The long-running, closed-door talks between Washington state and federal agencies over future cleanup of the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site are continuing, a Washington state Department of Ecology spokesman said Tuesday.
“Holistic negotiations are still ongoing,” Ryan Miller, communications manager for Ecology said in a Tuesday email response to an Exchange Monitor inquiry. “The parties continue to meet regularly, most recently last week.”
“At this time, we can’t speculate when negotiations might conclude and any type of pronouncement might be issued,” Miller went on to say.
When contacted Wednesday, a DOE spokesperson said only the negotiations continue, and the parties continue to meet regularly.
The state has been meeting off-and-on for about three years now with DOE, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, all signers of Hanford’s 1989 Tri-Party Agreement, and a federal mediator. The parties have agreed not to reveal specifics of what is being discussed.
In late September, William (Ike) White, the acting head of the DOE Office of Environmental Management, told Exchange Monitor the talks are making headway and should conclude within a year.
At the time, White said the negotiations take time because the issues are complex and involve nuclear remediation that will take decades to carry out.
In May 2021, David Bowen, the Washington state Department of Ecology’s nuclear waste program manager, said he was “optimistic we can come to an agreement” on ways to expedite cleanup at the former plutonium production site.
Back in September 2019, Hanford’s DOE site manager, Brian Vance said the feds were ready for “a holistic and realistic path forward,” on the schedule for disposal of 56 million gallons of radioactive tank waste at Hanford and related issues. In May 2019, then-Washington Ecology Director was threatening to drag DOE into court over failure to meet agreed-upon milestones for emptying single-shell tanks holding radioactive waste at Hanford. Initially, the federal-state talks were only expected to last a year.
