U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), whose district includes the Hanford Site, wants Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm to continue a controversial policy change from the Donald Trump administration that declared certain radioactive waste now categorized as high-level may not need to go to a deep underground disposal site.
In a March 30 letter to Granholm, Newhouse sided with Tri-Cities mayors and other Hanford-area officials from Franklin and Benton Counties, writing that the 2019 policy change “has the potential to make their community safer by treating tank waste sooner.”
Newhouse also took a swipe at Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Washington state Department of Ecology’s director Laura Watson who in February joined the Yakama Nation, Hanford Challenge and the Natural Resources Defense Council, in urging Granholm to end the high-level waste reclassification policy before it really begins.
Newhouse said the state leaders petitioned the federal government before consulting the local officials who are most directly affected by the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste in Hanford’s 177 underground tanks. The waste is leftover from producing plutonium for Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear weapons.
DOE believes it can safely lower the hazard classification level of some radioactive waste, which would unlock disposal methods other than a deep-geologic repository for high-level waste, such as the moribund Yucca Mountain. To back its policy, the agency relied on its own 2019 reinterpretation of existing law, an eleventh-hour administrative change to DOE Order 435.1-1 during the final days of the Trump administration, and a 2020 pilot disposal project in which the agency sent a small amount of waste from the Savannah River Site, previously deemed high-level, to a commercial site in Texas for disposal.
For now, at least, the debate over the policy’s impact on Hanford is largely academic given the National Defense Authorization Act for 2021 blocks the DOE from applying the new policy in the state of Washington.
Even if Congress lifted the prohibition, DOE would be legally allowed to reclassify only waste generated by the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel for defense activities. The agency believes it can safely dispose of such material as transuranic waste, the sort accepted at DOE’s deep-underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
