This budget season, the Hanford Site got a bigger budget before Congress even published any appropriations bills, with the Joe Biden administration amending its 2023 spending request to provide over $90 million more for the biggest ongoing U.S. nuclear-weapons cleanup.
The new Hanford figure is the result of a recent budget amendment from White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called attention to Wednesday in a press release.
With the amendment, the White House is now requesting $2.613 billion for Hanford, up from $2.522 billion in the initial 2023 request. If the request becomes law, Hanford would receive about an $18 million budget increase compared with what was approved for fiscal year 2022 in an omnibus appropriations bill signed in March. Fiscal year 2023 begins Oct. 1.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management runs Hanford from two local offices: the Richland Operations Office that handles the mostly solid-waste cleanup at the site’s central plateau and the Office of River Protection, which administers the mostly liquid-waste cleanup of Hanford’s underground tank farms. Murray’s press release did not say exactly how the additional $91 million requested for Hanford cleanup would be apportioned.
The tank farm, leaking in places, is the most daunting cleanup in the old weapons complex, housing roughly 56 million gallons of highly radioactive liquid byproducts of Cold War plutonium production during the arms race with the Soviet Union.
Congressional sparing over Hanford’s budget request is an annual tradition.
In a May hearing this year, Murray told Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm that the old Biden budget request shorted cleanup of Hanford’s Building 324, a former research facility near the Columbia River that is sitting atop a bad radioactive waste spill that frustrated plans for the building’s demolition more than a decade ago.
