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Biden administration proposes ‘disappointing’ Hanford budget cut in 2023

By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald
Published: March 30, 2022, 8:31am

The Biden administration has proposed less money for the Hanford nuclear reservation next year than Congress approved earlier this month for the current fiscal year.

Monday an administration budget request was sent to Congress that recommended about $2.4 billion for the Hanford site in fiscal 2023.

That is $172 million less than the current spending level.

And it is far less than Washington state officials say is needed to keep Hanford environmental cleanup on track.

“Once again the president’s budget proposes underfunding cleanup of the Hanford site,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., in a statement. “This will only delay the overall mission and is totally counterproductive.”

The Washington state Department of Ecology, the state agency that oversees federal cleanup at Hanford, said that $3.35 billion will be needed for Hanford cleanup next year.

Instead, the spending request released Monday was $24 million less than the budget proposed a year ago, which Congress then bumped by $128 million for a record high Hanford cleanup budget of $2.6 million, or $2.7 billion when security spending elsewhere in the federal budget if added to the Hanford total.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee posted on social media that he was concerned about the Biden administration’s 2023 budget request, with budget decisions made now having consequences for generations to come, he said.

“Now is the time to redouble our efforts at Hanford, not to curtail them,” he tweeted.

“We can’t wait until the 22nd century,” he added in another post.

But even though the Biden administration has proposed Hanford budget cuts, they are far smaller than the $748 million cut recommended by the Trump administration in the final year before Biden took office.

“While it’s disappointing to see a proposed budget that would not sufficiently fund Hanford cleanup, we’ve been here before, and we know our congressional delegation will do everything they can to bring the numbers up to where they need to be,” said David Reeploeg, vice president for federal programs for the Tri-City Development Council.

Larger budgets will be needed after fiscal 2023, according to TRIDEC and state officials for the vitrification plant and other pressing cleanup work.

The Department of Energy plans to start operating part of the $17 billion Hanford vitrification plant in fiscal 2024 to treat some of the least radioactive of the 56 million gallons of waste in underground tanks.

It also will need to make progress on the vitrification plant facilities planned to handle and treat high-level radioactive waste.

The state Department of Ecology says $3.76 billion will be needed for Hanford cleanup in fiscal 2024.

“Without significant increases in funding in future budgets, we will continue to see delays in progress, heightened environmental risk, and it will ultimately require billions more in cleanup costs,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee last week, shortly after state Ecology Director Laura Watson returned from Washington, D.C.

Calls for larger Hanford budgets

She and David Bowen, Ecology’s Nuclear Waste program manager, made the trip to urge federal officials to adequately fund Hanford cleanup. The state Department of Ecology is a Hanford cleanup regulator.

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That the current fiscal year’s funding reached a new high but “still falls hundreds of millions below what is needed demonstrates the challenges ahead of us,” Watson said.

The 580-square-mile Hanford site was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce 67 tons of plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

Now work is under way to clean up the radioactive and hazardous chemical waste and contamination at the most contaminated nuclear site in the nation.

A 2022 DOE cost and schedule projection for remaining cleanup at Hanford says an estimated $300 billion to $640 billion will be needed to finish most work by 2078 and continue monitoring of the site through 2095.

To finish cleanup on that schedule and at $300 billion would require spending to be above $4 billion each year from 2023 through 2069.

“Just some basic math indicates that spending at Hanford will peak in eight years at about $7.5 billion … which is nearly triple the amount we have right now,” said Bowen at the Hanford Advisory Board meeting last week. That’s if Hanford cleanup is finished at the low range of cost estimates.

The administration’s budget request released Monday still lacked detailed breakdowns of projects on how the administration proposed fiscal 2023 money be spent.

However, it proposed close to $1.6 billion be spent on tank waste, including emptying aging underground tanks prone to leaking and preparing to treat the waste at the vitrification plant. The funding would be split with $799 million for the vitrification plant and $806 million for the tank farms.

That is $40 million below the current request.

The Richland Operations Office, which is responsible for all cleanup not related to tank waste plus maintaining and operating the nuclear reservation, would receive $818 million for its work. That is $132 below current spending.

The initial budget documents did not say whether the Biden administration would again try to zero out payments in lieu of taxes to local governments in Benton, Franklin and Grant counties.

The payments are intended to make up for the Hanford land that would be contributing property taxes for services such as schools, public health, libraries and roads had the land not been seized by the federal government during World War II.

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