RICHLAND – The Hanford Advisory board says a proposed change in deadlines to clean up radioactive waste in the reservation is too extreme.

The Tri-City Herald reports that the U.S. Department of Energy has proposed changing 64 deadlines in the Tri-Party Agreement that governs the Hanford cleanup, but the board says the new deadlines would not speed up work and would instead delay some projects.

State and federal environmental regulators say they have known for some time that deadlines for cleanup of central Hanford cannot be met. However, in a letter to the DOE and its regulators, the board wrote that the proposed extended deadlines don’t reflect the urgency of cleanup.

Hanford for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons and is one of the nation’s most polluted nuclear sites.