Hanford Needs $1.66 Billion To Continue Cleanup Down 2 Percent From Amount Received For Current Fiscal Year

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation needs $1.66 billion to keep its cleanup programs on track in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, Hanford manager John Wagoner said Tuesday.

That’s down 2 percent from the $1.7 billion received for the current fiscal year, which was less than the $1.87 billion requested.

“This is a bare-bones budget if any of them have ever been,” Wagoner said. “With this budget, we do support our Tri-Party Agreements and our commitments. If the appropriations is less than this, some will not be achievable.”

The Tri-Party Agreement, signed n 1989 by the U.S. Energy Department, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Ecology, established a long-term environmental cleanup plan for Hanford.

Wagoner said he could not estimate how the scaled-down budget request would affect employment at Hanford, which was created during the Manhattan Project of the early 1940s and for many years processed plutonium for nuclear weapons. In recent years, the focus has shifted to cleanup at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.

“The thing that’s really going to change is who people are working for,” Wagoner said. “We’ll have a new contractor in October, and we don’t know how many people will be working for that contractor or how many jobs will be created by private companies that will be doing work on the site.”

Most of the budget request, about $1.29 billion, is for environmental management projects, Wagoner said.

About $484 million would be used to work on Hanford’s 177 aging waste tanks, 70 of which have already sprung leaks. That figure includes $185 million that will not be spent during the fiscal year, but is intended to show the government’s commitment to privatization of the tank-waste issue.

“The government requires that when you make a commitment, you bank the money so you don’t spend it elsewhere,” Wagoner said.