The House Appropriations Committee, which last week advanced a spending bill with about $7.9-billion in fiscal 2023 funds for the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office, is still concerned about long-term remediation costs of the Hanford Site in Washington state.
House appropriators remain antsy about the money and time needed to fully clean up the site used for decades to make plutonium for U.S. military purposes, according to a Energy and Water subcommittee report that accompanies the spending bill.
The total cost of Hanford cleanup could run anywhere between $300-and- $640 billion, with a potential completion date of 2078, the DOE said in a lifecycle study published earlier this year. “This timeline could leave local communities at risk for an unnecessarily long period of time,” according to the committee.
House appropriators urged DOE and its stakeholders to “seriously consider all cleanup options that have the potential to reduce costs and safely expedite cleanup” while protecting the public and environment.
The DOE “is reminded that meeting the Consent Decree milestone for operations of Direct Feed Low Activity Waste must remain the Department’s top focus within the Office of River Protection,” the report said.
Hanford’s top manager, Brian Vance, said last week he remains optimistic the agency will start turning low-level radioactive tank waste into glass by the end of 2023. While the agency is seeking a federal court’s blessing to extend a formal deadline potentially until 2025, this is largely to preserve DOE’s legal options, Vance told the Hanford Advisory Committee last week.
