An Environmental Protection Agency transition team official for President Donald Trump expressed interest in picking up the pace of cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site.
Trump tapped Washington state Sen. Doug Ericksen (R) to serve as one of 10 transition team members for the EPA in Washington, D.C.; the lawmaker also is the team’s communication director. He flew home to Washington state, where he continues to serve in the Legislature, and spoke at a press conference on Thursday.
“We have been in a holding, delay pattern for far too long,” Ericksen said of Hanford cleanup. “I am optimistic the new administration will make it a priority to actually get it done.”
He predicted the Trump administration would move forward with cleanup at a more rapid pace than its predecessor. “We have a new administration, a new leader, who likes to get things done,” Ericksen said. “Hopefully, we will change our tune and start getting things done. That will be the new direction for Hanford and EPA.”
Ericksen gave no specifics about how Hanford cleanup might be accelerated or made more efficient. The decades-long project involves two DOE offices and a host of contractors cleaning up the legacy of plutonium production at the site, including 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste held in underground tanks.
The EPA, along with the Washington state Department of Ecology and Department of Energy, are the agencies of the Tri-Party Agreement, which lays out a remediation plan for Hanford and sets legally enforceable deadlines.
Ericksen said he also plans to work in his role as chairman of the state Legislature Energy, Environment, and Telecommunications Committee to speed Hanford cleanup. He will not move to Washington, D.C., permanently, he said. The senator said he neither seeks nor has been offered more than a temporary job there, but would consider an appointment to a federal position in the Northwest, including at the EPA.
Hanford’s two DOE offices, the Office of River Protection and the Richland Operations Office, together received roughly $2.5 billion in fiscal 2016, which ended on Sept. 30 of last year. Federal funding since then has remained frozen at fiscal 2016 levels under budgetary continuing resolutions, the latest of which expires on April 28.
The Department of Energy has made progress at Hanford in recent years. Successes include finishing much of the environmental remediation along the Columbia River corridor, which helped reduce the active cleanup footprint on the 580-square-mile site to 82 square miles. Work on the river corridor has included remediating 977 waste sites, demolishing 428 facilities, and removing 18 million tons of debris and contaminated soil.
Other high-profile work has slowed at Hanford’s Waste Treatment Plant and tank farms, in part due to safety issues. The plant will convert the legacy waste into a solid glass form, but technology issues that must be resolved to ensure its safe operation have delayed some construction and contributed to pushing out the milestone for full operation to 2036. DOE says increased use of supplied air respirators to protect workers from breathing chemical vapors associated with tank waste is needed for now but that it has slowed work in the tank farms.
