Hanford contractor says up to 350 layoffs possible

RICHLAND – A contractor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation has warned employees that layoffs loom if funding cuts are not restored to the federal government’s proposed 2006 cleanup budget.

CH2M Hill Hanford Group will cut as many as 350 jobs if the U.S. Department of Energy’s proposed budget cuts for Hanford are adopted. However, that number represents a worst-case scenario for the contractor’s 1,400 employees, the company said.

“We have already seen positive signs coming from Congress, and we remain hopeful that our work scope reduction for 2006 will be less than initially thought,” Ed Aromi, CH2M Hill Hanford Group president, said in a memo to employees Monday.

The 2006 cleanup budget proposed by the Bush administration cuts funding for Hanford by as much as $290 million from the 2005 budget of about $2.1 billion.

A House committee restored about $200 million of the cuts to an appropriations bill, putting the proposed budget at about $2 billion.

The Energy Department has said the cuts were made, in part, as a result of work being completed at the site. But state officials and the Washington and Oregon congressional delegations have said that as projects are completed, spending must be shifted to other cleanup work at Hanford where little progress has been made.

Last month, another contractor at the site announced plans to lay off as many as 1,000 workers – nearly one-fourth of its work force – in late September. The contractor, Fluor Hanford, employs 3,886 people at the site.

Those layoffs are in addition to 700 construction workers who were laid off by Bechtel National at the waste treatment plant earlier this year. Another 300 nonconstruction workers for Bechtel will lose their jobs in June.

The federal government created Hanford as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. For 40 years, the south-central Washington reservation made plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

Today, it is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site. Cleanup costs are expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion by the time the work is completed in 2035.