Hanford cleanup needs stable funding, better management

Paige Knight, president, Hanford Watch
May 26, 2006

The cleanup of the 580 square miles of Hanford Nuclear Reservation concerns everyone in the Pacific Northwest. We would like Congress to support stable funding for all Hanford cleanup activities. We cannot achieve success without stability.

The greatest environmental threat facing the nation, 54 million gallons of high-level toxic waste sitting adjacent to the Columbia River in Hanford's tanks, pose a greater risk to the public and to the environment as each year passes. Sixty-seven tanks out of the 177 buried tanks have been known to leak in the past, threatening the Columbia River again (which was the most irradiated river in the Western Hemisphere in the 1980s). Eventually all tanks will leak.

Due to the Department of Energy's poor management of Hanford for many years, and due to Bechtel's underestimation of the cost of the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) and its fast track build/design approach which compromises safety, the project is 11 years behind schedule and the cost has nearly doubled from $4.3 billion to over $11 billion. If the Waste Treatment Plant is not built in a timely fashion the Columbia River, the life-blood of the Northwest, will eventually become poisoned. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) has recommended that Bechtel slow down its design/build fast tracking of the project and that DOE change its management approach. The GAO has made this last recommendation many times in the past to no avail.

Other serious problems exist. Currently, the completion of the work at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP), an old plutonium processing plant and the K Basins (two very toxic buildings housing spent nuclear fuel rods from the 9 Hanford reactors) has been set back because of reduced funding. We are very concerned that curtailing funding will compromise the clean up of the K Basins and the PFP, two of the three biggest threats to public and environmental safety. Limiting funding now will result in much higher costs in the future.

The Department of Energy's continued mismanagement can no longer be tolerated. The DOE must change and be held more tightly accountable. This should be a top priority for Congress. We need more effective oversight of nuclear waste clean up; the House Appropriation subcommittee's recently passed requirement of safety oversight of the WTP by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a step in the right direction. We need real visionary management at the DOE.

We request the following from the Congress:

The Vitrification Plant at Hanford is the largest construction project in the United States. The goal is to "make safe" the massive amount of nuclear waste there. The DOE not only lacks an overarching sustainable vision, but also has too many conflicting missions. Allocating billions of dollars to cleaning up toxic waste while at the same time providing billions of dollars to researching the new, "safe" nuclear power plants of the future, is a conflicting mission as well as a muddled and visionless policy decision.

Congress and the Administration must heed the future consequences of the energy choices they are currently planning. New nuclear power plants and the reprocessing of waste will continue to create tons of irradiated nuclear fuel that has nowhere to go. We must all, with leadership from Congress, acknowledge and face the consequences of diverting our land and dollar resources to dangerous and highly toxic choices. Major rivers such as the Savannah and the Columbia are dying. Our people are dying of cancers from irradiated dust blowing in the Western wind, and toxic waste is being trucked down our highways to storage facilities. For the United States, the real nuclear threat is from within.

As an overarching policy, we urge stable and continued funding for Hanford and all nuclear waste sites in the country and a common sense and visionary leadership at the DOE. Our future energy crunch must include restoring our environment as well as creating real sustainable options.

We count on the Congress and the Senate to insure the safety and health of our region.