Merging the Hanford Site’s two field offices in Washington state will not deprioritize cleanup of millions of gallons of radioactive tank waste, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told House appropriators Wednesday.
DOE has for years planned to combine Hanford’s Office of River Protection with the Richland Operations Office in 2025, the same year the site now plans to begin solidifying some of its 56 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste into glass-like cylinders.
In 2018, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), whose district abuts the site, inserted language into a defense policy bill to keep the Office of River Protection open until 2025. DOE created the office at Congress’ direction in 1999 to ensure focus on the liquid waste left over from Hanford’s plutonium production days.
“As you know funding has got to continue to grow as the vitrification process moves forward,” Newhouse told Granholm at Wednesday’s hearing on DOE’s fiscal year 2025 budget request before the House Appropriation Committees energy and water development subcommittee.
“It is just a top priority,” Granholm said, adding it will not be “subsumed in any way, shape or form. … It will not be deprioritized.” Solidifying the waste and protecting the Columbia River, is an issue that extends beyond Hanford, she said.
DOE has been taking steps toward unified Hanford Site management almost since Newhouse delayed the sunset date for River Protection. In 2019, the agency instilled Brian Vance as the sole site fed. Vance remains at Hanford today as the head of both River Protection and Richland.
Newhouse also said he was slightly concerned that the Joe Biden administration’s budget request for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in fiscal 2025 would decline to $8.2 billion from $8.5 billion appropriated by congress in fiscal 2024.
While DOE’s Cleanup to Clean Energy program is a worthy endeavor, Newhouse said some local officials in the Tri-Cities have felt excluded by DOE in land use planning.
Granholm replied she was unaware of the local concerns and added DOE’s acting head of nuclear cleanup, William (Ike) White, “is there all the time,” and anxious to work with the community.
On a key National Nuclear Security Administration issue, Granholm told subcommittee Chair Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) that a re-baselining of the Uranium Processing Facility at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee should be done soon. Costs have risen due to factors including labor shortages and post-COVID supply chain issues.
The Uranium Processing Facility will replace Building 9212, which has long produced highly enriched uranium, but is an old building that fails to meet modern nuclear safety and security standards, according to NNSA’s fiscal 2025 budget justification.
Overall, NNSA would receive $25 billion or $1 billion more than in the fiscal 2024 appropriation. Fleischmann said in a press release he was happy to see continued funding for the Uranium Processing Facility, as well as plutonium pit production, the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear, and a new version of the B-61 gravity bomb, the B61-13.
Meanwhile, during her questioning period, Rep. Susie Lee (R-Nev.) got Granholm to reassert on the record that DOE under the Biden administration has no intent to try and revive the Yucca Mountain high-level waste geologic repository, or similar facility in Nevada.
