1,000 to lose Hanford jobs

RICHLAND – A contractor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation plans to lay off as many as 1,000 workers – nearly one-fourth of its work force – in late September, a company official announced.

Fluor Hanford Chief Executive Ron Gallagher announced the layoffs in a message to employees Wednesday afternoon.

Fluor is the primary contractor for cleanup and manages the Hanford nuclear site, where plutonium was produced for the nation’s nuclear weapons program. The company employs 3,886 people at the site.

“The pace of cleanup has reached a point where significant changes to the work force are necessary to reflect the work scope that remains for the balance of our contract,” Gallagher said.

Fluor’s contract is set to expire in September 2006. In the past year, the company has stabilized 20 tons of plutonium material at the Plutonium Finishing Plant and removed 2,300 tons of spent fuel from Hanford’s K Basins, two leak-prone pools of water designed to hold spent nuclear fuel.

In the coming months, the company expects to complete several other projects, including the removal of radioactive sludge from one of the K Basins and the removal of plutonium residue from parts of the Plutonium Finishing Plant.

Fluor also expects to finish draining liquid sodium from the Fast Flux Test Facility, a research reactor built to test advanced nuclear fuels.

The 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.

Gallagher warned Fluor employees in early March that both a near-term layoff and more layoffs over the balance of Fluor’s contract would be needed. A month ago, layoff notices were given to 148 workers.

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 on Wednesday 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 all 14 U.S. representatives from Oregon and Washington have said that as projects are completed, spending must be shifted to other cleanup work at Hanford where little progress has been made.