SPOKANE — The state of Washington is rejecting the U.S. Department of Energy’s proposal to amend the federal court agreement governing cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the nation’s most polluted nuclear weapons production site.
The state on Friday sent a letter to federal lawyers, saying the March 31 proposal that would have eliminated many deadlines for Hanford cleanup “is not acceptable to Washington.”
Hanford for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons, and now is engaged in cleaning up the nation’s largest volume of radioactive wastes.
That cleanup is governed by a federal court consent decree that sets strict milestones for the cleanup process. But the Energy Department has said it is in danger of missing many of those milestones because of the complexity of the work.