Hanford waste classification will get attention in Senate

RICHLAND – The battle over cleaning up million of gallons of nuclear waste buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation should heat up in Congress this week, as the Senate debates reclassifying some highly radioactive waste so it could be left underground.

The U.S. Department of Energy is bound by law to clean up and dispose of high-level radioactive waste generated at nuclear weapons facilities, sending it to a deep geologic repository. Less-radioactive waste from the tanks can be disposed of in a state-permitted facility on site.

In its current form, language in a defense authorization bill would apply only to waste at South Carolina’s Savannah River site — allowing it to be reclassified as low-level waste. But critics fear passage of that bill could result in more waste being left in Hanford’s aging underground tanks.

The bill also would allow the department to withhold cleanup money for Hanford and an Energy Department site in Idaho until Washington and Idaho agree to allow waste to be reclassified.

The Energy Department has said the change will speed cleanup and potentially save millions of dollars, but critics are outraged.

“That’s blackmail,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., an outspoken opponent. “Certainly, the advocates will say it saves a lot of money, but I don’t think you want nuclear waste cleanup on the cheap.”

About 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste from World War II and Cold War-era plutonium production is buried in Hanford’s 177 aging underground tanks. At least 67 of the tanks have leaked more than 1 million gallons of radioactive brew into the soil, contaminating the aquifer and threatening the Columbia River.

The 1989 Tri-Party Agreement, a cleanup pact signed by the state, the Energy Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, requires the Energy Department to remove as much waste as technically feasible, but not less than 99 percent.

The Energy Department plans to siphon out the liquid and sludge waste from the tanks, turning that into glass logs for disposal, but it maintains the remaining residue is too expensive to extract.

Instead, the department has proposed reclassifying it as low-level waste, encasing it in a mortar-like grout, then filling the tanks with concrete and leaving them in place.

The legislation could be a way of trying to get around state oversight, said David Mears, senior assistant attorney general for Washington state.

“What I fear DOE would argue is that having removed significant portions of the liquid waste, that we then can’t regulate what remains,” Mears said. “There is quite a substantial amount of waste the DOE could try to leave in place and avoid state regulatory oversight.”

The debate could come to a head at Hanford in the coming weeks as the Energy Department and the state discuss closure of tank C-106, a particularly troublesome tank due to high heat.

The Energy Department said it has pumped 99 percent of the waste out of the tank, at a cost of about $125 million. The equivalent of about 1-inch-thick residue remains. State officials dispute that the full 99 percent has been removed, but they have begun reviewing samples from the residue to determine what risk it poses.

The concern is that any waste left in the tanks could pose a danger to the Columbia River less than 7 miles away, said Mike Wilson, nuclear waste program manager for the state Department of Ecology.

State officials fear some dangerous soluble waste could reach the river in as little as a decade once it’s in the groundwater, depending on which tank leaks, Wilson said. Heavier wastes, such as uranium, cesium and strontium, may take longer to reach the river, but they also remain active in the soil for much longer.

“They will eventually get to the river. It may be thousands of years, but they will reach it,” Wilson said.

A spokesman for the Energy Department said officials there were unsure how the state arrived at its groundwater travel time.

Even in the unlikely event that a capped tank leaked, the department’s modeling shows it would take thousands of years for any residue to move out of the tanks to the groundwater and into the river, said Erik Olds, a DOE spokesman.

A federal judge in Idaho last year barred the Energy Department from reclassifying waste in the tanks after the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Snake River Alliance, the Yakama Nation and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes filed suit.

Washington state has since joined five other states in filing “friend of the court” briefs to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to uphold the Idaho judge’s decision. Oral arguments are expected to be heard later this year.