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Hanford cleanup will need $3.6 billion in 2016

The sun shines on a radioactive hazard warning sign at a landfill used to bury hazardous materials at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Wash. (Associated Press)
Annette Cary Tri-City Herald (Kennewick)

Hanford will need about $3.6 billion in fiscal 2016 to meet its legal obligations for environmental cleanup, officials said Wednesday at the annual Hanford budget meeting in Richland.

That’s $1.5 billion more than the Obama administration has proposed for fiscal 2015 and still might not be enough to meet legal obligations.

Department of Energy Hanford officials based their projection for fiscal 2016 on DOE’s proposal to amend the court-enforced consent decree that sets some deadlines for retrieving radioactive waste from leak-prone underground tanks and treating the waste for disposal at the vitrification plant.

The state’s proposal to amend the consent decree is more aggressive and could add $300 million more to annual budgets, according to an early estimate by the Tri-City Development Council. That increase does not include the state’s request for eight new double-shell waste storage tanks to securely hold high-level radioactive waste, which could add hundreds of millions more.

Ten deadlines under the legally binding Tri-Party Agreement already are projected to be missed elsewhere at Hanford by the end of fiscal 2015, according to DOE.

Most of those deadlines will be missed because work fell behind when Congress failed to pass an annual budget and because of sequestration, or forced federal budget cuts, said Jon Peschong, deputy assistant manager for cleanup at the DOE Hanford Richland Operations Office.

Hanford is not going to get $3.6 billion in fiscal 2016, said Dave Einan of the Environmental Protection Agency, a Hanford regulator.

“We’re going to have to prioritize,” he said.

However, the state will not accept lack of money as a reason for not doing required work, said John Price of the Washington State Department of Ecology, also a Hanford regulator. The Tri-Party Agreement requires DOE to request enough money to do legally required work.

About 40 percent of the DOE environmental cleanup budget already goes to Hanford, pointed out Roy Gephart, a retired scientist.

The Western Governors’ Association has recognized that issue and has asked that enough money be budgeted to meet cleanup obligations at all major DOE sites, Price said. Not only would the Hanford budget increase to meet obligations, but other cleanup sites also would receive more federal money under the association’s request.

The fiscal 2016 budget proposal includes an increase in spending from the $545 million in the administration’s budget request for Hanford tank farms in fiscal 2015 to $961.3 million. Money for the Hanford vitrification plant would increase from $690 million to $970.6 million.

That would bring the total budget request for those projects to almost $2 billion. In recent years the total budget for all Hanford work has been a little more than $2 billion.

DOE plans to complete emptying all 16 tanks in the C Tank Farm in fiscal 2015 and prepare to start retrieving waste from the single-shell tanks in the A and AX Tank Farms, said JD Dowell, deputy manager of the DOE Hanford Office of River Protection.