While the numbers won’t be out for another week, House and Senate committees used Wednesday hearings to press Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and other DOE officials about the progress of nuclear cleanup.
During a four-hour hearing before the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee, Granholm said the Joe Biden administration’s fiscal 2022 budget request “sustains our investment” in the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) cleanup.
But the pledge struck Rep. Kim Schrier (D-Wash.) as insufficient. Although roughly a third of the $7.5-billion EM budget now goes toward cleanup of the former plutonium production complex, DOE would not finish its cleanup of Hanford until the 2070s, Schrier said.
“Sustainment could mean untenable delays” for a property located so close to the Columbia River, Schrier said. If anything, Hanford cleanup should be accelerated, Schrier said, adding within the past month a Hanford single-shelled tank was confirmed to be leaking.
“I have not been to Hanford” yet, Granholm said. “Both of us will probably not be around when this site is cleaned up,” the energy secretary said. “We are totally committed to cleaning up Hanford,” Granholm added, noting DOE should start converting low-activity tank waste into a glass form by the end of 2023.
During recent years, Congress has funded DOE’s nuclear cleanup office at more than $7-billion annually. “Even so we have a half-trillion-dollars in environmental liabilities,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo). In response to DeGette, Granholm said DOE is working on measures to increase financial accountability sought by the Government Accountability Office.
The issue of Hanford tanks would emerge later during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in which Sen. Angus King, (I-Maine) pressed William (Ike) White, the acting assistant secretary of energy for environmental management, about the safety of Hanford’s 177 underground tanks.
There are two tanks at the Hanford Site that DOE believes are “actively leaking,” White said. Officials last month confirmed the B-109 tank is leaking.
The DOE considers T-111, also a single-shell tank, to be actively leaking, and has classified it as such for a number of years, based primarily on slowly falling levels in the tank, Washington state spokesman said Thursday.
Over the life of the complex there are probably more than 60 that have leaked at some point. Over the years DOE has sought to pump much of the liquid out of the oldest and most at-risk tanks, White said.
While DOE is approaching the startup of vitrification of low-activity tank waste at Hanford, the federal agency is still working with the state of Washington and others on plans for solidifying the more high-activity waste found in the sludge at the bottom of the tanks, White said.
“You have perhaps the hardest job in the Department of Energy,” King told White during the hearing.
