Details appended to President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2024 budget request show the budget for the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state would grow to about $3 billion, up from $2.7 billion from the current fiscal year.
“The fiscal year 2024 record Hanford budget request by President Biden of more than $3 billion is a huge step forward for Hanford cleanup and the entire Pacific Northwest,” Laura Watson, director of the Washington Department of Ecology, said in an emailed statement released through a spokesperson Monday evening. “This announcement shows that our collective efforts to increase funding and keep the cleanup on track are gaining traction in Washington, D.C.”
Hanford’s Office of River Protection would receive about $1.98 billion under the White House details, up from $1.73 billion in the current fiscal year, while the Richland Operations Office would be funded at $921 million, down slight from just over $1 billion in fiscal 2023, according to a chart on page 370 of a budget appendix.
More than $100 million in budget adjustments for safeguards and security and other items push Hanford’s estimated budget past $3 billion, the Washington Ecology spokesperson said by email.
Several other big Cold War and Manhattan Project nuclear sites could see their Office of Environmental Management spending stay flat or dip slightly in the coming fiscal year, according to spending figures packaged with the appendix for the Defense Environmental Cleanup account.
The Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee would see its Defense Environmental Cleanup allocation stay roughly flat at about $505 million in Biden’s request for the DOE Office of Environmental Management. Defense environmental spending for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina would dip to $1.58 billion from $1.65 billion. Likewise, Idaho National Laboratory spending would decline to $447 million from $458 million.
However, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico’s Defense Environmental Cleanup share would rise to $464 million in fiscal 2024, up from $459 million in fiscal 2023.
The Department of Energy had not released its full budget justification for the Office of Environmental Management as of Tuesday morning. That DOE document usually includes detailed site-by-site explanations of the funding requests for each DOE nuclear-weapons-cleanup site.
The 2024 fiscal year starts on Oct. 1. The administration request is virtually assured to be altered in Congress, starting with the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee.
