Feds to reduce waste shipments to Hanford

The U.S. Department of Energy said Wednesday it will substantially reduce the amount of some radioactive waste it plans to ship to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

After state officials raised concerns, the agency decided to limit the importation of low-level radioactive waste and low-level radioactive waste mixed with hazardous chemicals to far less than the amount it originally evaluated for disposal at Hanford.

“We made it clear our commitment was to continue and accelerate, where we could, the cleanup of Hanford,” said Jessie Roberson, assistant energy secretary for environmental management. “Our commitment is not to just bring lots of stuff to Hanford and leave it.”

State Attorney General Christine Gregoire criticized the revised plan.

“Until DOE has demonstrated the commitment and capacity to clean up the contamination already at Hanford, they should not ship additional waste,” said Gregoire, who is seeking the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

State Department of Ecology officials had not seen the final decision and could not immediately comment on details, spokeswoman Sheryl Hutchison said Wednesday.

But the reduction was not a surprise because the state considered the original numbers to be extremely high, she said.

A Hanford watchdog group derided the decision.

“As every kindergartner learns, we must clean up the contaminated mess at Hanford before adding more radioactive waste,” said Gerald Pollet, executive director of Heart of America Northwest. “You can’t clean up while dumping more waste into the soil near the Columbia River.”

In a document released last January, the Energy Department analyzed the environmental consequences of importing as much as 220,000 cubic meters of low-level waste, and as much as 140,000 cubic meters of mixed low-level waste to Hanford from other sites.

That drew criticism from environmental groups and state officials.

In a final record of decision released late Wednesday, the Energy Department said it would limit the waste that could be sent to Hanford to 62,000 cubic meters of low-level waste and 20,000 cubic meters of mixed low-level waste.

The originally proposed amounts “were the outer limits of what they could possibly imagine,” Hutchison said. The final document included more realistic numbers, she said.

The state for years has asked that any waste imported to Hanford be tied to the achievement of major cleanup goals at the site.

“We do not have that yet,” Hutchison said.

Hanford, located near Richland, was created as part of the Manhattan Project in World War II to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. The 586-square-mile site now contains the nation’s largest collection of nuclear waste.

In a nod to state concerns, Roberson said the Energy Department would immediately stop disposing of low-level waste in unlined trenches, rather than stopping in 2006, as it originally proposed.

A new lined facility will be constructed by 2007 to hold the waste, Roberson said. Until then, the DOE will dispose of radioactive waste in existing lined facilities, she said.

The decision also called for using Hanford facilities to store and process transuranic waste prior to shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

The Energy Department on Wednesday also reaffirmed its 2002 decision to transport small amounts of transuranic waste from a site in Columbus, Ohio, to Hanford, if an earlier court injunction is lifted.

In a third decision, the Energy Department said it intended to dispose of defense transuranic waste containing PCBs in amounts greater than 50 parts per million at WIPP. Such wastes are currently located at Hanford and other sites around the nation.

All the decisions depend on getting funding from Congress, Roberson said.

In March, state officials sent a letter to the Energy Department saying they remained concerned that Hanford would become a radioactive waste dump for the nation.

The equivalent of about 75,000 55-gallon barrels of radioactive waste are buried at Hanford. The material can take thousands of years to decay to safe levels.

An initiative likely to go before state voters this fall seeks to block the federal government from sending radioactive waste from other states to Hanford until all the existing waste at the site is cleaned up. It would do so by preventing the state from approving permits for new waste facilities. Critics question the constitutionality of the measure.