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LUBBOCK, Texas—Rose Gardner lives just a few miles from a West Texas site that could soon be a permanent dumping ground for radioactive waste. The prospect worries her.

But, the 50-year-old Eunice, N.M., resident and flower shop owner said, it’s not just her future that concerns her.

“If we bury this stuff we’re all going to be in trouble,” Gardner said Monday, a day before she and others rally in Austin against a license that would allow Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists to dispose of radioactive byproduct wastes. “We could all be victims of this contamination. I think it will happen.”

Opponents want state regulators to grant a contested case hearing so they can challenge the license.

A three-member panel of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on Wednesday has three options: reject the hearing request and grant the company its license, deny the license or send it to an administrative judge who will hear the case being made by the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.

The environmental group, along with Gardner and her sister-in-law—who lives in Texas about 3 miles from the site—and some former agency employees will hold a rally Tuesday afternoon at the Sierra Club’s offices in Austin.

If commissioners grant Waste Control its license, the company still has about nine months of construction before it can begin burying the Cold War era radioactive material trucked to West Texas from a shuttered weapons processing plant in Ohio a couple of years ago, Andrea Morrow, an agency spokeswoman said.

Commission personnel would monitor the additional construction before the waste could be buried, she said.

Opponents could appeal commissioners’ decision to grant the license.

Waste Control also is seeking a disposal license for low-level nuclear waste, which would dwarf the byproduct’s radioactivity.

In March, the company agreed to pay the state $151,000 in penalties for self-reported violations in 2005 — for radioactive materials, including Plutonium-239 and Americium-241, that got into an administration and laboratory septic system; and in 2006 — for elevated amounts of metal contamination in the railcar unloading area.

Information on the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site shows that the chemicals in the 2005 incident involving the septic system, which is within a quarter-mile of a well used for drinking water, would not appear to pose significant public health risk.