The Hanford Advisory Board is calling for the Department of Energy to ramp up to $4 billion in annual spending for cleanup of the Hanford Site in Washington state, despite DOE officials saying that will not happen.
A combination of operating the Waste Treatment Plant starting within a half-decade while construction continues on parts of the facility, plus dealing with deteriorating facilities elsewhere at the former plutonium production site, will require $4 billion budgets for about five years starting in 2022, according to project projections. The escalation to that amount must be gradual to allow for hiring and training additional workers, board members said.
Of the $4 billion, about $1.2 billion will be needed for Richland Operations Office projects to comply with environmental remediation milestones set under the Tri-Party Agreement, the Washington state Department of Ecology says. The Richland Operations Office is in charge of managing the site and most cleanup except that related to Hanford’s waste storage tanks and the Waste Treatment Plant.
Site-wide operations at Hanford now receive roughly $2.2 billion to $2.5 billion per year. Stacy Charboneau, associate principal deputy assistant secretary for field operations at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), told the Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board in October that Hanford stakeholders should not expect the overall EM budget (roughly $6 billion per year) to increase or for Hanford to get a larger percentage of the budget.
The Hanford Advisory Board, in advice to DOE, warned that the decades-old facility “is in a dangerous and destructive cycle in terms of its funding. The amount of funding required to maintain Hanford’s aging facilities, site infrastructure and surveillance requires a substantial amount of funding, roughly $600-$700 million per year.”
Many of Hanford’s buildings and storage facilities are 50-70 years old, according to the board. “Delays add to overall costs to the cleanup both because of the large amount of money spent on maintenance and because degradation from delay increases the risk of significant accidents,” the board said. “With funding below budget request, paying for these significant added costs further reduces the amount of funding available for cleanup.”
Examples include the partial collapse of the oldest PUREX plant radioactive waste storage tunnel in May and stabilizing the second PUREX tunnel; the $100 million spent to empty double-shell Tank AY-102, which had multiple leaks between its shells; and reroofing the REDOX processing plant to keep it stable until it can be remediated.
While key work is getting done at Hanford – including demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant and preparations to move cesium and strontium from underwater to dry storage – progress on the projects has been slower than necessary because of funding constraints, the board said.
In addition to encouraging DOE to propose to Congress and the White House Office of Management and Budget the steady funding increase to $4 billion, the board also advised the department to plan for contingency funding at the national level. When an incident occurs unexpectedly at Hanford, mitigation or remediation could be done without robbing other site cleanup projects of funding. The Energy Department also should develop an emergency plan specifically for a major failure in a waste tank, the board said, and also reiterated its call for additional double-shell tanks.
Hanford stores 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste in underground tanks. It has just 27 double-shell tanks in service to receive waste emptied from its 149 single-shell tanks for storage until the waste can be treated for disposal.
The board also on Monday sent advice to DOE and its regulators – the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington state Department of Ecology – calling for resumption of annual, in-person State of the Site meetings. The meetings give the public the opportunity to ask questions on any Hanford topic and hear directly from top Hanford and Hanford regulator management. The meetings have only been held sporadically in recent years, with the last in-person meeting in 2014 followed by an Internet virtual meeting this year.
The board called for annual meetings to resume, starting with several around the Pacific Northwest in the coming spring: “The board believes that in-person meetings with decision makers demonstrate a true commitment to the goals of transparency and public policy deliberation.”
