Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday morning her agency’s Office of Environmental Management remains on track to commence treatment of low-activity tank waste by the end of 2023 at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The startup of direct feed low activity waste (DFLAW) operations would mark the beginning of the Waste Treatment Plant’s conversion of the 54 million gallons of radioactive waste in Hanford’s 177 underground tanks, left over from decades of plutonium production, into a stable glass form for permanent disposal.
Granholm pointed to the startup of DFLAW in her written testimony for the hearing on the defense aspects of the Department of Energy’s fiscal 2022 budget request.
During the budget year that starts Oct. 1, the Office of Environmental Management (EM) plans to initiate operations at the Tank-Side Cesium Removal unit, which is necessary to prepare waste for DFLAW treatment, Granholm said in her written testimony. The Joe Biden administration’s $7.6 billion for EM, slightly above the $7.5 billion enacted level, includes $6.8 billion for defense-environmental cleanup.
At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the White House request of $333.5 million will support start of deactivation and decommissioning work at the Ion Beam Facility, along with remediation activities at the DP-Road site, a public road in Los Alamos County.
Murray Takes Turn Grilling Granholm on Money for Hanford, PILT
For the second time in two weeks, a senator from Washington state insisted Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm raise the Joe Biden administration’s financial commitment to long-term Hanford Site cleanup and continue payments to localities bordering Department of Energy nuclear facilities.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) hammered at the topics during Granholm’s Wednesday appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Energy and Water Development subcommittee to discuss the fiscal 2022 DOE budget request. The White House seeks almost $7.6 billion for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and nearly a third of the total would go toward Hanford.
“I remain concerned about the long- term projections for this site,” Murray said. A 2019 report from DOE during the Donald Trump administration projected a Hanford lifecycle cost of anywhere from $323 billion to $677 billion with final cleanup not finished until 2078.
Assuming the worst case proves accurate, Hanford would require about $11 billion per year over about 57 years, Murray said. While the lawmaker did not mention it, even the more optimistic scenario would still need average Hanford funding over the same span at more than double the $2.6 billion enacted by Congress for fiscal 2021 or the almost $2.5 billion requested by DOE in fiscal 2022.
The DOE and the national labs constantly look at ways to accelerate cleanup at an easier-to-swallow cost, Granholm said, but “right now I don’t have a silver bullet.”
As her colleague, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), did last week before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Murray pressed Granholm for more money to deal with “a laundry list” of projects at Hanford and questioned why DOE’s proposal slashes payments in lieu of taxes (PILT) at Hanford as well as the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The PILT funding is meant to compensate local communities supporting the nation’s nuclear arsenal who work on hundreds of square miles of land that cannot be taxed because it is federal property, Murray said.
“PILT funding has long been an issue here, and I want to be clear it cannot be eliminated or cut back in any way,” Murray said. The lawmaker also asked Granholm to explain the rationale for curtailing PILT.
To this Granholm said “historically” administrations request budgets that do not include PILT, but Congress subsequently inserts it. “We would like to see it included in the [administration] budget,” going forward, Murray said.
