The Washington Department of Ecology says Congress’ Hanford’s fiscal 2022 appropriation is a few hundred million dollars short of meeting the site’s legal obligations for the year.
At a Tuesday public Zoom briefing, the Washington State Department of Ecology put Hanford’s congressional appropriation for fiscal 2022 at $2.95 billion, under the omnibus budget bill signed into law last week. However, the state said that Hanford needed $3.3 billion in fiscal 2022 to meet all of its legal cleanup obligations.
The state’s calculation includes, among other things, Hanford’s share of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management’s (EM) safeguards and security appropriation. The omnibus lists that funding as a lump sum and does not show individual EM sites’ share of the take.
At Tuesday’s briefing, the ecology department showed figures that had Hanford’s annual appropriations being less than needed to meet its legal cleanup obligations for every year since fiscal 2017.
Each underfunded year adds six months to Hanford’s decades-long cleanup schedule, said John Price, the ecology department’s Tri-Party Agreement manager. The Tri-Party Agreement is the chief agreement among DOE, the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that governs Hanford’s cleanup timetable and goals. The agencies estimate cleanup will continue into the 2070s.
Meanwhile, DOE officials said fiscal 2023 calculations are still being worked on in Washington, D.C. The 2023 budget request was nominally due to Congress in February but presidents of both parties routinely blow this deadline.
After the 2023 budget request that federal agencies will have been working on for close to a year goes to Congress, planning will begin for the fiscal year 2024 request. Officials said they hosted Tuesday’s briefing to spark public feedback about what the fiscal 2024 Hanford priorities should be. People can email their input through April 15 to [email protected].
DOE officials said the fiscal 2023 budget will include money to transfer 1 million of Hanford’s 56 million gallons in tank wastes in one double-shell tank in preparation for the site’s planned direct feed, low-activity waste vitrification campaign, set to go online in late calendar year 2023.
DOE’s targets so far for fiscal 2024 include additional design work and some limited construction on a stalled high-level waste vitrification plant.
Other 2024 goals are removing the floor from a giant hot cell in Hanford’s 324 Building, along with some other modifications to the same structure. Also, DOE plans 2024 improvements to the Waste Encapsulation Storage Facility and west-central Hanford’s pump-and-treat station for contaminated groundwater.
