(The Center Square) – Washington Sen. Patty Murray, D-Bothell, said this week that the Biden administration has proposed a Hanford site cleanup budget for 2023 that falls far below what is needed to keep the work on track.
“The federal government has a moral and legal obligation to clean up the Hanford site and failure to adequately fund the mission there really jeopardizes that promise,” she told Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Wednesday.
Granholm was pressed to defend the administration’s cut of $172 million from the 2022 nuclear reservation budget of $2.6 billion to clean up the site in Benton County, Washington.
Murray’s exchange with Granholm took place at the Senate Appropriations Emergency and Water Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.
“The DOE’s own estimates in its most recent Hanford ‘lifecycle’ cost and schedule report show that $262 million is needed in fiscal 2023 to meet legal obligations under the Tri-Party Agreement just in cleanup along the Columbia River at Hanford,” Murray said. “But your 2023 budget only requests $135 million for this account. Do you believe that request is adequate?”
Granholm agreed that legal commitments need to be funded. However, she said planning a budget was a matter of balancing spending on environmental cleanup projects across the nation.
“Well, I assure you at the site, it’s not just numbers. It’s about an incredibly important site in this country and we have a requirement to make sure we clean that up,” Murray said.
The Hanford 324 Building, which sits above the spill of high-level radioactive waste, will remain safeguarded and maintained until work can be financed in a future budget, Granholm said.
“We are not blind to how important it is to address it,” she said.
Murray said inadequate funding at Hanford disrupted work to prepare the $17 billion Hanford vitrification plant to treat high level radioactive waste for permanent disposal. Some of the waste has been stored since the 1940s in underground tanks that are prone to leaking.
Murray questioned why the department had proposed major funding increases for nuclear weapons and naval reactors while cutting the budget for clean-up sites like Hanford.
“Again, this is a question of balancing equities across all of the portfolio at DOE,” said Granholm. “It is the largest cleanup site that we have.”
“I am really disappointed by this year’s [budget] request. We’ve got to do better than this,” said Murray.
More than 56 million gallons of radioactive waste were left in contaminated buildings, soil and groundwater at the 580-square mile Hanford site following production of nearly two-thirds of the nation’s plutonium from World War II through the Cold War.
