Richland, WA
The nation’s new energy secretary faced a tough crowd when he explained the administration’s proposed 28 percent cut to the Hanford budget at recent Senate hearings.
Among work that would be halted under the reduced budget is the cleanup of highly radioactive waste that has leaked from a building into soil a mile north of the city of Richland and near the Columbia River.
It’s part of the shifting of priorities at Hanford, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette told Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., at a Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee hearing.
Efforts have been refocused on starting to vitrify, or glassify, some of the site’s radioactive waste stored in underground tanks, he said.
Murray is particularly concerned about the cut of 39 percent proposed for the DOE Hanford Richland Operations Office, which would leave its funding at $556 million.
The Richland Operations Office is responsible for operating the 580-square-mile-site and all environmental cleanup except work to manage and treat the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste held in underground tanks, some of them prone to leaking.
Hanford produced plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program from WWII through the Cold War, leaving contaminated groundwater, buildings and waste burial sites, and the tank waste.
The 324 Building leak cleanup is just one of the projects that could be “significantly harmed” by deep budget cuts, Murray said.
Treatment deadline looming
“What I’m hearing from home is that people are really worried about the impact of these decisions on our workers,” Murray said. “Safety is always top priority at this site and, critically, transparency between DOE and Washington state partners is absolutely essential on this.”
The 324 Building spill cleanup can be safely deferred because contamination in the soil beneath the building does not appear to be spreading, Brouillette said.
Extensive work already has been done on the project to prepare to stabilize the building and then cut through the floor to dig up the soil using an excavator arm mounted in a hot cell of the building.
Work had been planned to be done remotely by operating the excavator arm from outside the cell and looking through a leaded window.
DOE officials have said that the radioactive cesium and strontium contamination beneath the building is so radioactive that it would be fatal within a few minutes of human contact.
Deferring work at the 324 Building allows DOE to focus on preparing to treat some of the Hanford tank waste by a federal-court enforced deadline of 2023, Brouillette said.
The Hanford vitrification plant, under the management of the DOE Hanford Office of River Protection, has been under construction since 2002 and construction on the part of the plant that will treat the least radioactive of the tank waste is expected to be done this year.
That part of the plant , which will glassify low-activity waste for disposal, still will need to be started up and tested. Construction on the parts of the plant that will treat high level radioactive waste has been delayed.
Hanford site deadlines
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., came to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing armed with the Hanford Department of Energy letters with requests for funding in fiscal 2021.
The letters are required under the legally binding Tri-Party Agreement to seek enough money to allow DOE to meet the agreement’s deadlines.
The administration request of $1.8 billion falls $1.5 billion short of what DOE Hanford officials said was needed, Cantwell said. The current budget is about $2.5 billion, not including security funding.
“We take those DOE letters seriously, because they’re the ones negotiating with the state to meet those agreements,” she told Brouillette, who was confirmed as energy secretary three months ago.
The Washington state Department of Ecology is a Hanford nuclear reservation regulator and a party to the Tri-Party Agreement, and can fine the federal government $30,000 per week for missed deadlines in the agreement.
Brouillette replied that Hanford is his highest priority, as he has said previously, and is receiving about a third of the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s budget.
Money carried over from the current fiscal year can be used to help with next year’s cleanup, he said.
Worst Hanford site problems
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., pointed out that the proposed budget cut comes as a recent Government Accountability Office report criticized DOE for not doing enough to guard against the failure of obsolete structures still standing from World War II and early in the Cold War.
A failure of facilities waiting for cleanup could release radioactive material into the air or ground.
“We’ve got some of the worst problems at Hanford and some of the oldest,” Wyden said. “You’re producing a budget that’s going to take it even longer to deal with them.”
He challenged Brouillette to “tells us which of the problems you’re going to kick down the road even further not that you have a budget that proposes cutting such a substantial amount of money,” he said.
Brouillette said “very low risk projects” had been picked for funding cuts at Hanford, and other work around the DOE nationwide complex would be deferred to concentrate on startup of Hanford’s vitrification plant.
“I wish I had a nickel for every time a secretary has said that ‘we’re dealing with the high priority safety and public health questions and we’re going to have to defer some of the less important ones’,” Wyden said.
Every new energy secretary looks at the spending at Hanford and looks at cutting the budget, Cantwell said.
But the important question that should be asked is what it takes to clean up the largest nuclear waste site in the world, she said.
“I just don’t want the budget to be the target. I want the cleanup to be the target,” she said.
Wyden asked Brouillette to submit a list to him by mid month of which Hanford projects would be delayed under the administration’s proposed budget cut.
Although the administration makes a request for the amount of money it would like spent on federal projects annually, Congress has the authority to set the amount, absent a presidential veto.
