$1.8 Billion Budget Proposed For Hanford

Moving spent nuclear fuel and contaminated soil away from the Columbia River and shifting dangerous wastes from leak-prone tanks are priorities in a $1.8 billion Hanford budget proposal unveiled Monday.

“The budget the president has submitted … for Hanford is one that supports the Department of Energy’s commitment to protect the Columbia,” Hanford Manager John Wagoner told a news conference.

“During fiscal year 1999, we will begin moving spent nuclear fuel away from the river, cleaning up ground water and making significant progress in tank waste treatment.”

Hanford, created during the Manhattan Project of the early 1940s, processed plutonium for nuclear weapons for many years. But in recent years, the focus has shifted to cleanup at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.

Much of the funding request is based on completing some of the most urgent cleanup jobs by 2006, then making Hanford Nuclear Reservation land available for other public uses, Wagoner said.

President Clinton has asked Congress to approve spending nearly $1.5 billion on cleanup activities for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. That compares with a $1.1 billion request last year and includes an additional $330 million to turn over cleanup of high-level radioactive and hazardous wastes to private companies.

There still is a $47 million gap between what the Energy Department had sought and what the President is asking from Congress.

Wagoner said the department is looking for ways to shrink that gap through more efficient management, outsourcing jobs and reordering priorities.

The pace of cleaning up the complex will quicken with completion of a building to store some of the 2,300 metric tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel now sitting in leak-prone pools called K basins, which are adjacent to the river. In addition, some 620,000 tons of contaminated soil will be moved away from the river, Wagoner said. The budget plan also calls for pumping and treating 1 billion liters of contaminated ground water under the 560-square-mile reservation.

Contracts also are expected to be awarded by next summer leading to construction of a plant to turn 54 million gallons of radioactive and toxic wastes, now stored in 177 underground tanks, into a glasslike substance, Wagoner said.

The contents of some of the tanks have leaked, and several have experienced heat buildup, requiring complicated venting of flammable gases.

The budget asks for $300 million for conducting tank waste safety programs, upgrading equipment and pumping the contents of the underground tanks, Wagoner said.

“The progress this budget assumes is pretty significant,” he said, noting that two of eight defunct production reactors on the Columbia River shoreline will be deactivated and work will begin on deactivating two others.

Clinton’s proposal also contains $31 million to keep an experimental reactor on “hot standby” for another year while the Energy Department decides whether it will be used to produce tritium for nuclear weapons and, later, isotopes for nuclear medicine. The Energy Department said it wants to make a final decision on the Fast Flux Test Facility, a prototype “breeder” reactor, this year.

“This is great news for the Tri-Cities, and I will continue to press Energy Secretary (Federico) Pena to make a final decision as soon as possible,” Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., said.

But the plan is opposed by groups who see spending money to start up the reactor as a drain of resources that should be going to clean up the nuclear reservation.

“Outrage over the abuse of Hanford cleanup funds to maintain the reactor for a weapons mission will only get worse by continuing to illegally spend tens of millions (of dollars) a year on a dangerous reactor,” said Gerald Pollet, executive director of the anti-nuclear Heart of America Northwest in Seattle.