RICHLAND, WA – The federal government is unenthusiastic about cranking up its biggest cleanup project next month at the Hanford nuclear site in south-central Washington. But it will meet an Oct. 15 deadline to bring the so-called glassification facility online, the U.S. Department of Energy said Thursday.

Whether the department may move later to shut down the facility, which will be used to turn radioactive waste into glass, is still hazy.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., talked with U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Wednesday about earlier reports the Department of Energy wanted to back out of firing up the long-delayed Hanford plant by Oct. 15 and go to an undefined alternate method to neutralize 56 million gallons of radioactive waste.

That waste is stored in 177 leak-prone underground tanks in the center of the Hanford nuclear reservation and is at risk of seeping into the Columbia River.

Wright acknowledged to Murray that he wants to stall work on, or possibly eliminate, a completed facility to convert 20 million to 25 million gallons of the least radioactive tank wastes (dubbed “low-activity wastes”) into a benign glass. The process involves mixing the wastes and glass flakes and melting them together.

The department’s Thursday statement and Wright’s discussion with Murray contain ambiguous statements that, while promising glassification will begin by Oct 15, do not rule out the Department of Energy switching directions later.

Murray’s office acknowledged these ambiguities and said the Department of Energy still needs to answer many questions to clarify its intentions and thought processes. In its statement, the Department of Energy’s Washington, D.C. headquarters did not address the Washington State Standard’s questions about the lack of clarity.

“I need to see real evidence that this administration is moving forward on our decades-long effort to turn nuclear waste into glass at Hanford. I also need an explanation for the conflicting information I have gotten from the Department over the last 48 hours—and I need the Deputy Secretary to sign off on key documents so the completion of hot commissioning at the Waste Treatment Plant can move forward,” Murray said in a statement on Friday morning.

Gov. Bob Ferguson, in a written statement Thursday, said that if the federal government backs away from its glassification plans at the site, it would be a “stunning waste of resources, a violation of multiple legal agreements and a slap in the face to the workers who have brought us to this point.”

“We will be challenging this decision. There’s too much at stake for the people of Washington and our environment,” Ferguson said.

Ferguson planned to discuss the issue further at a press conference on Friday afternoon in Kennewick.

On Wednesday, Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said his office is monitoring the situation, including preparing to leap in if the federal government tries to stray from its legal obligations on this project.

Washington State Department of Ecology Director Casey Sixkiller said he’d seen news reports and heard from Murray’s office that the federal government has decided to abandon its efforts to commission the waste treatment plant.

“If these reports are accurate, it would violate legally binding agreements,” Sixkiller said. “We are now just days away from beginning to treat low-activity radioactive waste at Hanford, and any delay or change in plans would threaten years of work and billions of dollars in investments.”

‘I am not satisfied’

Murray said that Wright “admitted to me during a phone call that the Department of Energy is planning to curb hot commissioning at the Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford — an astonishingly senseless and destructive move and a threat to the entire nuclear cleanup mission at Hanford.”

The secretary’s comments, Murray said, didn’t track with “positive news” from the lead contractor on the project, Bechtel, that safety reviews and technical tests for one of the waste treatment melters were completed, and the facility was on track to begin operating next month.

“Not only has this facility already been built, but commissioning is ahead of schedule. Secretary Wright claimed that moving forward with hot commissioning is an issue of safety, but records do not corroborate his assertion,” Murray added.

Wright did not elaborate to Murray about the nature of the safety issue. The Department of Energy did not reply Thursday to emailed questions on this and other matters.

“Whether Secretary Wright was given bad information or is simply confused about how the (glassification) facility works, I can’t say, but I am not satisfied by his explanation for why DOE has suddenly decided to stall progress on the Waste Treatment Plant,” Murray said.

Murray also said she’d put a hold on the nomination of Tim Walsh to oversee Hanford.

Walsh is Wright’s intended replacement for Roger Jarrell, who was fired Monday from his position as principal deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, which oversees Hanford’s cleanup.

Politico E&E reported that Wright wants to replace Jarrell with Walsh as part of a move to take Hanford’s cleanup in a different direction.

Decades of cleanup still ahead

Hanford has been looking at glassifying its tank wastes since the 1990s.

It began construction in 2002, with the first glassification plant legally scheduled to go online in 2009 — 16 years before it actually will. This first plant is supposed to take care of 40 to 50 percent of the tanks’ “low-activity” wastes.

The master plan has been to build two low-activity glassification plants plus a third to handle the site’s 5 million to 6 million gallons of high-level radioactive tank wastes.

The entire project’s original budget in 2002 was $4 billion. This has grown to roughly $30 billion. The first low-activity waste plant cost slightly more than $9 billion.

Hanford’s cleanup is governed by a frequently modified 35-year-old legal contract among the Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state ecology department, plus some federal court decrees — meaning the cleanup schedules and standards are legally locked in.

The U.S. government set up Hanford in 1943 to create plutonium for the nation’s atomic bombs, including those exploded in New Mexico and over Nagasaki in 1945.

That development work created many billions of gallons of chemical and radioactive wastes, the worst 56 million gallons of which were pumped into 177 underground tanks. About a third of those tanks leak. At least a million gallons of radioactive liquid have leaked into the ground, seeping into the aquifer 200 feet below and then into the Columbia River, roughly seven miles away.

The tanks are considered the worst radiological contamination problem in the Western Hemisphere.

Hanford’s current legal target calls for glassifying all wastes by 2052. The Department of Energy has internally moved those targets back to 2069, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office.

After four years of closed-door negotiation, the Department of Energy, the EPA and the state agreed to try encasing the contents of 22 tanks in grout, which is a cement-like substance.

The Government Accountability Office has been bullish on the grout idea.

Since 2017, the watchdog agency has issued three reports strongly recommending that the Department of Energy look at replacing the second low-activity-waste glassification plant with a plan to grout the roughly 50 percent of low-activity wastes not handled by the first low-activity plant. Grouting is theoretically a faster and cheaper option.

Washington officials have always been skeptical about grout, citing its lacking of track record with the types of wastes found in Hanford’s tanks. The Department of Energy has been mum in the past about its preferences.

The 2024 agreement calls for grouting to be used on low-activity wastes found in 22 tanks that also contain high-level wastes. A decision on grouting technology — which will then lead to budgeting and scheduling — is due by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, all 149 single-shell tanks and the majority of the 28 double-shell tanks are way past their design lives. So far, only one double-shell tank has sprung a leak, in its inner wall, and thus can no longer be used.

Roughly one-third of the single-shell tanks are confirmed leakers and cannot be used to store wastes. At least 1 million gallons have leaked into the ground, with some already reaching the Columbia River seven miles away.

If leaks occur in more double-shell tanks, that could delay glassification by several years and create further problems. It would take seven years and $1.5 billion, the Government Accountability Office has reported, to build four 1-million-gallon double-shell tanks.

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