Washington state Department of Ecology Director Laura Watson and her top nuclear waste manager, David Bowen, visited Washington, D.C., last week to urge that more cleanup funds for the Hanford Site be included in the Department of Energy’s fiscal 2023 budget.
The Ecology officials were in the nation’s capital March 14-16 while President Joe Biden signed an appropriations bill for fiscal 2022 that includes almost $7.9 billion for the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and. Of that total roughly $2.6 billion is split between Hanford’s Office of River Protection and its Richland Operations Office.
The Biden administration’s request for fiscal 2023 is expected to be released on March 28.
“But the fact that the record funding for this budget still falls hundreds of millions below what is needed demonstrates the challenges ahead of us,” Watson said in an Ecology press release issued Monday. The agency wants a Hanford cleanup budget of $3.35 billion in fiscal year 2023 and another $3.76 billion in 2024, according to the Ecology press release.
The trip marked the first trek back to Washington, D.C., by state Ecology officials since the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread domestically in early 2020, Bowen told the online Hanford Advisory Board Wednesday. They met with representatives of the DOE Office of Environmental Management, as well as members of the state’s Congressional delegations including Sens. Patty Murray (D) and Maria Cantwell (D) as well as Rep. Dan Newhouse (R).
“Without significant increases in funding in future budgets, we will continue to see delays in progress, heightened environmental risk, and it will ultimately require billions more in cleanup costs,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said in the Ecology statement.
During the Hanford Advisory Board meeting, the DOE’s top manager for the site, Brian Vance, stressed the need for the agency and its contractors to get the maximum potential cleanup for the buck.
“We operate in a fiscally-constrained environment,” Vance said. There is always more work to be done than there will be money. So DOE and its stakeholders “must minimize risk reduction per dollar invested,” he added.
Ecology’s budget accounting is slightly different from the feds, including safeguards and security appropriation money under the Hanford line item. Ecology says Congress must increase the funding level for cleanup of the former plutonium production complex.
From World War II through 1989, the Hanford Site produced more than 67 tons of plutonium, leaving the federal property with extensive radiological and chemical contamination, including more than 55 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste stored in underground tanks.
