The House’s version of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act would require the Department of Energy’s Environmental Management office to notify Congress within two days if more workers are contaminated by radioactive material at the Hanford site in Washington state.
The bill also would require the Environmental Management (EM) office to provide a report to congressional armed services committees within seven days on any contamination release at the former plutonium production site.
In the report, EM would have to identify “the cause of the release, if known,” and how much and how long it would cost to contain the release and fix its root cause, according to the version of the bill released Monday by the House Armed Services Committee.
Workers at Hanford — the largest, most expensive Cold War nuclear-weapons-cleanup in the EM portfolio — have in recent years reported exposure to radioactive and toxic materials at the site’s liquid-waste tank farms, and its Plutonium Finishing Plant: a project described as the most dangerous demolition in the whole Department of Energy weapons complex.
The committee passed the bill later in the week. The annual National Defense Authorization Act sets policy and spending limits for U.S. defense programs, including some EM cleanup work, and active nuclear weapons programs run by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
For NNSA, the bill would authorize work on a new low-yield, submarine-launched, ballistic-missile warhead, among other things. The weapon would be a less powerful version of the W76 warhead now in service on U.S. ballistic-missile submarines.
