The Department of Energy’s latest budget request would reduce spending at the Hanford Site in Washington state by $118.8 from current levels. The total budget would be $2.22 billion for fiscal 2018, not including security costs.
The proposal would add about $5 million to the budget of Hanford’s Office of River Protection, for a total of $1.5 billion. The office oversees the site’s waste storage tanks and the Waste Treatment Plant being built to treat the waste.
That leaves the Richland Operations Office with a proposed cut of $123.8 million from current spending, to $716 million. The office is in charge of all other work at the site near the city of Richland, including maintenance, monitoring, and cleanup of aging facilities including the radioactive waste storage tunnel that was discovered on May 9 to have partially collapsed.
The planned budget reduction comes despite calls to ensure the Richland Operations Office has sufficient funding to address aging infrastructure in the wake of the tunnel collapse, from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell (both D-Wash.), and Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.).
Murray called the budget request “a real disappointment.” “It puts us in a tough place to continue critical cleanup work and meet legal deadlines,” she said. Cantwell said the proposed spending levels pose a threat to workers, the public, and the environment. “We must have full funding for Hanford cleanup – especially after the recent tunnel collapse,” the lawmaker said. “Any cuts would be not only irresponsible, but would undermine the federal government’s moral obligation to clean up Hanford.”
The budget request did not give a project-by-project breakout of spending as the annual request typically includes. In recent years the Richland Operations Office has focused on remediation of the Plutonium Finishing Plant and the facilities and waste sites on the 220 square miles along the Columbia River. The majority of that work has been completed, with DOE planning to ramp up work next in central Hanford. That area encompasses about 500 facilities, including huge processing canyons, and more than 1,000 waste sites, many of them highly contaminated. In fiscal 2016, the Richland Operations Office budget was $921 million.
The budget request for the Office of River Protection breaks down the proposed $1.5 billion into three categories. It includes $713 million for the tank farms and $698 million for the Waste Treatment Plant, which is up slightly from the $690 million budget planned annually for the plant since the start of construction. In addition, $93 million would be directed to the Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System, which is planned to prepare some low-activity radioactive waste for vitrification at the Waste Treatment Plant as early as 2022. The plant is not expected to be fully operational until 2036 due to technical questions about parts of the facility that will process high level radioactive waste.
