Up to $590 billion still needed to clean up Hanford Site

As much as $589 billion will be needed to finish environmental cleanup and some monitoring at the Hanford nuclear site in Eastern Washington, but there is some good news there.

Three years ago, the last time the Department of Energy issued its Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule and Cost Report, the upper estimate was higher at $640 billion.

The most expensive estimate has dropped about $51 billion as DOE and the Washington state Department of Ecology have reached an agreement on a path forward for treating radioactive waste held in underground tanks that should be more efficient.

The report plans for most cleanup to be completed in 2086, with additional activities to manage the site, including environmental monitoring, continuing until 2100.

To date $65 billion has been spent since the end of the Cold War on environmental cleanup of the Hanford site.

The “lifecycle” report issued by DOE every three years includes both a low and a high range estimate, with the high range including more money for risks due to uncertainty in some of the work.

The new low range estimate is $364 billion, an increase of $64 billion from the $300 billion estimated in 2022.

The estimate went up as work not included in the 2022 report was added to the current report.

That included final cleanup and disposition of eight plutonium-production reactors along the Columbia River that have already been “cocooned,” or put in work done to put them in temporary storage, to allow radioactivity to decay to more manageable levels before tear down or other disposition of the reactors.

This year both low and high cost estimates also factor in a 20% increase in base operating costs due to inflation since the report three years ago. In addition, all estimates are escalated to account for inflation through 2100.

The estimates include money for maintaining and monitoring the site post cleanup, which DOE calls long-term stewardship.

Without those costs and final reactor disposition, which could be done after most cleanup is completed, the estimated cost drops to $353 billion at the lowest to $578 billion at the highest.

Cost uncertainties

Among the uncertainties in the lifecycle report estimate are changes in future federal funding that would change the total cost of cleanup.

Lower than estimated funding drives costs up, and higher funding reduces costs due to fewer years of maintaining facilities and preventing radioactive releases, plus providing security, roads, utilities, fire suppression and other services and infrastructure at the 580-square-mile site.

Now Congress allocates about $3 billion a year for cleanup, but funding would need to peak at more than $8 billion in the early 2060s to achieve the low range cost estimate and $13 billion in 2075 for the high range cost estimate.

The Hanford nuclear reservation adjoining Richland was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

The site was left with radioactive and chemical contamination in the groundwater and the soil; contaminated equipment and other waste buried in the ground and hundreds of obsolete buildings, including huge, highly contaminated chemical processing plant.

One of the site’s major challenges is 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste in underground tanks, with most of the tanks, some holding waste since WWII, prone to leaking.

The report also gives schedule estimates, saying adding final disposition of the reactors will stretch the schedule from 2078 to 2086. But the high estimate still shows spending of $4 billion to more than $5 billion a year from 2089 to 2100.

The reduced overall cost in the high estimate was figured after the Department of Energy and its regulators ended nearly four years of negotiations in 2024 with a revised path forward for DOE’s most costly liability in the nation – the 56 million gallons of waste in underground tanks.

Cutting waste treatment costs

DOE and Washington state agreed on a plan to turn some of the least radioactive waste in the tanks into concrete-like grout rather than spending more to glassify all of the waste at the Hanford vitrification plant, as had long been planned.

The Government Accountability Office has concluded that grouting some of the least radioactive Hanford tank waste would allow the work to be done sooner and could save tens of billions of dollars.

The National Academies of Science also considered grouting and found it to be a technically strong alternative.

However, an earlier environmental study concluded that grouted waste buried in a Hanford landfill would eventually deteriorate from water in the soil.

To solve that problem grouted waste would be required to be shipped out of Washington state for disposal rather that being added to lined Hanford landfills, as is planned for some of the less radioactive glassified waste.

Salt formations, such as one in Texas, could instead be used for grouted waste disposal without concerns for water degrading the grout.

The holistic agreement reached last year by DOE and its regulators also would change DOE’s process for preparing high-level waste for treatment at the Hanford vitrification plant.

The new plan would change the process to one similar to that used to prepare low activity radioactive waste.

When construction started on the vitrification plant 23 years ago, plans called for the largest building, the Pretreatment Facility, to be used to separate tank waste into low activity and high-level waste streams for separate treatment and disposal.

But more recently DOE has been able to separate out some the least radioactive waste with a system set up near the tanks that uses filtration and an ion exchange system to remove the high-level waste, bypassing the unfinished Pretreatment Facility.

The new plan calls for the most radioactive waste also to bypass the partially built Pretreatment Facility, which stands 119 feet high and is wider than a football field and about 1.5 times longer.

A smaller effluent treatment facility would be built at the vitrification plant instead to support pretreatment of high level waste for vitrification and then disposed at a national repository, which has yet to be sited and built.

Comment on lifecycle report

DOE said in a statement that it looks forward to analyzing additional opportunities to increase efficiency in Hanford environmental cleanup without sacrificing safety or effectiveness.

DOE will take public comments on the new report, which will be considered as the next lifecycle report is prepared for release in 2028, for 60 days.

Send comments to lifecyclereport@rl.gov or mail them to Dana Gribble; Hanford Mission Integration Solutions; U.S. Department of Energy; P.O. Box 450, H5-20; Richland, WA 99354