The Department of Energy wants to convert 30 square miles of southeastern Hanford into a clean technology park.
Led by Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk, DOE officials talked about the concept, called Cleanup to Clean, on Friday with about 75 people, including developers, in Richland, Wash., near Hanford.
The agency wants to combine its cleanup and cheap energy missions by turning this area into a clean technology park, Turk said. However, DOE does not plan to pin down what it wants to put in that park for a while.
“We’re not going into this with: ‘It has to be this technology, it has to be that technology.’ … We’re soliciting creative options,” Turk said. He declined to say if solar panel farms would be considered for the site. A local Hanford official said wind might be a bad fit.
The feds want to receive comments from the public about the clean energy drive by Oct. 12. DOE expects to put out a request for proposals in late November and narrow down the field by early 2024.
Hanford comprises 586 square miles, of which the central portion and much of the Columbia River shoreline is highly contaminated. Southeastern Hanford, which borders Richland, includes a 30-square-mile section that is mostly uncontaminated.
That potentially developable area, adjacent to the Pacific Northwest Laboratory, includes the fenced-off Columbia Generating Station nuclear reactor and a long-defunct research reactor. A handful of small, mildly contaminated waste burial sites are also in the area, though these would be easy to clean out, DOE says.
Though the area has already been heavily surveyed on environmental and cultural matters, DOE officials estimated that it would take between two and four years to complete environmental impact studies for clean energy development on the available Hanford parcel.
Brian Harkins, DOE’s Hanford manager for mission support, said wind turbine farms would face hurdles in setting up in this area because of their vibrations. Just west of the 30 square miles is a Nobel-prize-winning observatory that captures gravitational waves from black holes and colliding stars. Its instruments are ultra-sensitive to outside vibrations.
The site could conceivably hold several projects simultaneously. The requirement is that any specific project must generate at least 200 megawatts of electricity. “We’re thinking big, really big,” said Ingrid Kolb, director of DOE’s Office of Management.
DOE announced in July that it wanted to generate carbon-free electricity at many of its shuttered nuclear weapons production sites. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm made the announcement in Washington at DOE headquarters.
