When pressed during a Senate hearing to say when the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state might be cleaned up, William (Ike) White, longtime DOE Environmental Management acting boss, said a “best-case” might be 2060.
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who chairs the Senate Armed Forces Committee’s Strategic Forces subcommittee, appeared surprised by White’s answer.
“2060? Wow,” King said during the May 22 budget hearing. “Keith Richards might be dead by then.” The reference to the mortality of the iconic 80-year guitarist for the Rolling Stones rock band, whose name has become a byword for longevity, drew laughter during the otherwise dry session on fiscal 2025 budget matters.
When asked by King for a Hanford cleanup date, White made an audible sigh and then caveated the answer by saying he was hesitant to hazard a guess because it will almost assuredly be wrong.
Compared with White’s best-case guess, the Office of Environmental Management’s projection in the fiscal 2025 budget justification is more pessimistic, placing final cleanup between 2078 and 2091.
White’s “2060-ish” best case is based partly on the prospect of being able to start large-scale use of grout and out-of-state commercial disposal for much of the low-level radioactive waste in underground tanks at Hanford.
The grout option benefits from the recently-announced “holistic” agreement, as it is called by DOE, the Washington Department of Environmental Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“Just that ability alone … to deal with the low-activity tank waste in that fashion, will save us hundreds of billions of dollars beyond just simply vitrifying the waste,” White said. Otherwise, Hanford cleanup would take much longer, he added.
King started his questioning by asking about ways Environmental Management might “chip away” at a half-trillion-dollars of nuclear cleanup environmental liability.
In his written and oral testimony, White plugged the DOE Office of Environmental Management budget request of $8.2 billion for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, which is a little less than the $8.3 billion approved by Congress for fiscal 2024.
The hearing came a day before President Joe Biden announced he is nominating White to join the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
DOE is seeking ways to reduce water used in retrieving tank waste, White said. There are probably 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical tank waste in Hanford’s underground tanks, left over from decades of plutonium production. But because water must be pumped into the tanks to loosen the waste, DOE will end up treating about 150 million gallons of waste, he said.
At the National Nuclear Security Site, a key portion of the property used for nuclear weapons research should be cleaned up by 2030, White said.
“Right now, we are very much focused on what I think is a historically interesting part of the site where some of the nuclear rocket work was done so the test cells and the old facilities there” are being decommissioned, White said in response to a question from Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) DOE currently lists 2035 as the cleanup projection date for the entire site.
An official video recording of the hearing is available online.
