The 1,200 or so employees at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will almost-certainly be retired by the time the Hanford Site in Washington state is fully cleaned up, based upon the budget request issued last week by the White House.
The acting boss for Environment Management, said last fall the nuclear cleanup office only had 15 federal employees under age 30. So it stands to reason few might still be on the payroll when Hanford is remediated more than a half-century from now.
As was the case last year, DOE’s best guess is the former plutonium production site near Richland, Wash., will be remediated sometime between 2078 and 2091, according to a “project schedule” table in the budget request for the cleanup office.
On the other end of the spectrum, cleanup of the Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) is basically done, according to the Department of Energy budget request issued last week by the White House.
SPRU is the onetime site of a pilot plant at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Niskayuna, N.Y., where research occurred during the early 1950s into the chemical separation of plutonium from other radioactive material.
The SPRU site was transferred back to the Office of Naval Reactors in December 2020 following cleanup by DOE contractor Amentum. The project schedule lists a 2025 final cleanup date for SPRU and says the remaining scope of work “consists of completing planning to address remaining transuranic waste, contract claims resolution, and closeout.”
The budget document continues to forecast that 10 of 15 Cold War and Manhattan Project sites should be essentially cleaned up within a quarter century.
In addition to Hanford, three other sites will likely also take more than a quarter century – Idaho National Laboratory (2049-2060); the Paducah site in Kentucky (2065 – 2070) as well as the Savannah River Site in South Carolina (2065).
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the nation’s only deep underground disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste, will have its end date “determined by the completion of cleanup at other sites,” according to the document.
The New Mexico Environment Department could have something to say about that through its ongoing consideration of a 10-year permit renewal for the salt mine disposal site.
