Spokane – The Trump administration is proposing a $230 million cut in cleanup spending at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in fiscal 2019.
The budget request released on Monday cuts $61 million from the budget for Hanford’s Office of River Protection, and $169 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Richland Operations Office.
The two offices would receive about $2.1 billion combined for the fiscal year.
Hanford for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons. The site near Richland is now engaged in cleaning up a huge volume of radioactive and hazardous wastes left over from plutonium production.
Critics have said Hanford’s budget must be dramatically increased to some $3 billion a year to achieve legal cleanup milestones.
