The Department of Energy will not be required to issue an annual report in January outlining the remaining costs and schedule for cleanup of the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The annual Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule and Cost Report has been mandatory since 2010, when it was added to the Tri-Party Agreement as part of negotiations that led to milestone extensions for the Hanford tank farm and Waste Treatment Plant under the court-enforced consent decree governing cleanup at the former plutonium production site.
The Hanford regulators – the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington state Department of Ecology – agreed with DOE that resources could better be used to prepare the 2019 life-cycle report due Jan. 31, 2019, than used for the document due in January 2018. This is the second consecutive year the department has been allowed to skip the report.
The Tri-Party agencies waived the annual requirement, in part, because a triannual analysis from DOE’s Office of River Protection of scenarios for its work at both the tank farms and Waste Treatment Plant is not due until Oct. 31, 2017. An updated baseline, which sets the cleanup plan going forward and will rely on information from the analysis, is not expected until June 1, 2018, months after the 2018 life-cycle report would have been required to be released.
The Energy Department was allowed to skip the 2017 life-cycle report, with regulators saying late last year that the significant number of recent changes to cleanup work plans at Hanford, and extensions to project milestones, showed DOE should wait to release a report until it had time to incorporate the updates.
The last life-cycle report released, in early 2016, put the remaining cleanup cost for Hanford at $107.7 billion, including completion of most work in 2060 and some post-cleanup oversight. The estimate did not reflect delays at the Waste Treatment Plant that will not have the plant fully operating until 2036.
