One local mayor is throwing his support behind the Department of Energy’s recent move to consolidate operations at the Hanford Site in Washington state under one manager.
“It’s the natural evolution of things,” Richland Mayor Bob Thompson said in a telephone interview.
He spoke a week after Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced that Brian Vance would serve as full-time manager for both the Richland Operations Office and Office of River Protection at Hanford. Vance, who has headed River Protection since 2017, became acting manager for the other Hanford office in February after the retirement of its manager, Doug Shoop.
Given ongoing progress on remediation at Hanford, such as the September completion of the K-Basin sludge transfer, it makes sense to have everyone at the 586-square-mile site under one boss, Thompson said. Hanford crews in September completed removal of highly radioactive sludge from underwater storage in the K West Reactor basin and relocation to the T plant for underground storage.
The scope of the remediation is gradually becoming smaller so it is logical to have one manager in charge of it all, said Thompson, a Richland City Council member since the 1990s who served as mayor between 2000 and 2004, and from 2015 until the present.
Hanford operations were divided into separate offices in 1998 through language placed into that year’s National Defense Authorization Act by then-Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), whose congressional district included the site. The River Protection office was established to increase focus on the 56 million gallons of radioactive tank waste at Hanford, while the Richland Operations Office retained oversight of remediation of the former plutonium production complex.
The dual office setup was also created to attract more funding to Hanford, and it has largely been successful, Thompson said. The two offices’ combined funding exceeded $2.43 billion in fiscal 2019. The two offices will remain separate for budget and administrative purposes at least until 2024, thanks to a provision in the 2019 NDAA inserted by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), who succeeded Hastings.
