The Department of Energy, Washington State and the Environmental Protection Agency are meeting more frequently these days to negotiate changes to legally binding Hanford cleanup deadlines that longstanding technical challenges — and later, COVID-19 — may have made untenable, a Washington state official said Wednesday.
“I am optimistic on some progress we have made,” Bowen told the Hanford Advisory Board during an online meeting. “[W]e are actually accelerating the frequency of those meetings.”
The Department of Ecology proposed “holistic” negotiations with DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency in 2019 concerning retrieval and treatment of radioactive waste stored in Hanford’s 177 underground tanks, said Bowen.
The state agency had threatened to go to court to force stricter DOE adherence to timelines laid out in the Tri-Party Agreement and other legally binding orders. Under a federal consent decree amended in 2016, 2018 and most recently in December, DOE must begin vitrifying low-activity waste — solidifying it in a glasslike mixture — in 2024, with high-level waste to follow in 2036. The Tri-Party Agreement requires DOE to complete treatment and vitrification of all Hanford’s high- and low-level tank waste by 2047.
The virtual holistic sessions are being run by mediators from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Lawyers from the state attorney general’s office as well as the U.S. Department of Justice are also participating, Bowen said.
Per a mediation agreement, the parties will not discuss status or progress during the negotiations, said Bowen, who became the state’s waste program manager in December, replacing Alex Smith, who left the Ecology job to take a post at another Washington state agency.
Advisory board member Pam Larsen said during the meeting she is encouraged by the tone of Bowen’s assessment of the talks with DOE and EPA.
Meanwhile, on a staffing note, Bowen said a one-time Washington Ecology inspector, Edward “Eddie” Holbrook will return to the agency next month as the waste management section manager.
Holbrook was an inspector with Ecology’s Tri-Party Agreement compliance section from 2014 to 2018 before leaving to help lead hazardous waste efforts at Tesla in Nevada, an Ecology spokesman said in response to an inquiry from Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. Holbrook replaces Chris Wend, who left in late 2020 to take another opportunity. The Ecology post was long held by Ron Skinnerland who retired from the state a couple of years ago, the spokesman said.
