The projected cost to clean up the Hanford Site in Washington state dramatically increased over the last three years, according to a Department of Energy report published Friday.
The 2019 Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule and Cost report put the remaining cost of Hanford cleanup at some $323 billion, in a best case scenario. In the worst case, it would be roughly $677 billion, according to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM).
That is up several times over from EM’s previous lifecycle report, released in early 2016. At that time, EM put the costs between $103 billion and $107 billion. Besides cleanup costs, both reports include about 20 years of limited spending on post-cleanup surveillance at the former plutonium production site.
In the 2019 report, EM estimates it will take until 2079 to clean up the site, in a best-case scenario. The annual cleanup budget in this scenario maxes out at about $9 billion in 2064. The 2019 site budget is roughly $2.5 billion.
Under the latest worst-case scenario, EM estimates it will not finish cleaning up Hanford until 2102, with peak annual spending of about $16 billion in 2088. The total cleanup bill of $677 billion in this scenario is over six times greater than what EM predicted for a worst-case scenario only three years ago. Then, the office thought cleanup would run at worst through 2065, with peak spending of about $3.75 billion in 2018.
The latest best-case estimate incorporates changed milestones for Hanford’s tank-waste-retrieval and treatment-completion milestones, as established in 2016 by a federal court’s amended consent decree. It also reflects DOE’s new plan to start treating low activity waste at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) as work continues on technical issues with high level waste treatment elsewhere at the plant. The consent decree requires that low activity treatment start by 2023, and that the plant be fully operational in 2036.
The 2019 worst-case scenario incorporates uncertainties such as cleanup taking longer than planned because WTP’s major processing facilities operate less efficiently than EM’s target of 70 percent. The worst-case also hedges against a high likelihood that WTP’s Pretreatment Facility, where construction remains halted because of technical issues, may not be completed in time to allow commissioning with radioactive waste by 2033, EM wrote in the report.
Under the Tri-Party agreement that governs cleanup at Hanford, EM is supposed to publish a lifecycle report every year. Hanford regulators allowed the Department of Energy to skip the report for the past two years so EM could include more information in the report it eventually did publish. The report is supposed to inform budget discussions between the agency and Hanford’s local, state and federal stakeholders.
