The U.S. Department of Energy said it will meet an October deadline to start up a $9 billion facility that will process waste at the Washington state site.
RICHLAND, WA – The federal government will begin turning some of its worst radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation into glass by an Oct. 15 legal deadline.
Last week, ambiguous signals out of the U.S. Secretary of Energy’s office about whether glassification would begin on time at the site in south-central Washington had spooked state leaders.
Late Wednesday, the office of Energy Secretary Chris Wright told congressional members that glassification would start on schedule.
Today, the Energy Department’s Richland office confirmed that information, adding that a specific start-up date has not been nailed down yet for between now and Oct 15.
Democratic U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, plus Republican U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, have led the congressional birddogging of this project.
Newhouse said in a statement that “despite unsubstantiated rumors and speculation,” the “signed approval from DOE is confirmation of what Secretary Wright told me multiple times over the past 10 days, that there will be no delays to the start of the Waste Treatment Plant.”
Murray said by email that, “after unacceptable delays, it’s good that DOE has finally heeded my call to sign the paperwork necessary to move forward with the final step of hot commissioning before treatment of radioactive waste can begin on Oct. 15.”
Cantwell echoed Murray’s remarks.
Gov. Bob Ferguson in a written statement that the state would “hold the Trump Administration accountable to the Oct. 15 deadline.”
“The united voices of workers, businesses and elected leaders are making a difference,” he said.
Last week, Politico E&E reported that Wright replaced Roger Jarrell with Tim Walsh as principal deputy assistant secretary of DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, as part of a move to take Hanford’s cleanup in a different direction.
When Murray telephoned Wright about this last week, he told her that the Department of Energy is planning to curb hot commissioning at the glassification plant, citing an undefined safety consideration.
That sparked massive concerns among Ferguson and Washington’s congressional delegation that the glassification plans were in jeopardy.
The U.S. government set up Hanford in 1943 to create plutonium for the nation’s atomic bombs. That work created 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.
Hanford began construction of a plant to begin treating the waste in 2002. It was originally legally scheduled to go online in 2009 — 16 years ago.
This first plant is supposed to take care of 40-50% of the tanks’ low-activity wastes. The master plan has been to build two low-activity glassification plants plus a third to handle 5 million to 6 million gallons of high-level radioactive wastes.
The entire project’s original budget in 2002 was $4 billion, which has grown to roughly $30 billion today. The first low-activity waste plant cost slightly more than $9 billion.
Currently, Hanford’s legal target calls for glassifying all tank wastes by 2052. DOE has internally moved those targets back to 2069, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office.
Last year, the feds and state agreed to look at possibly encasing some low-activity wastes in grout — a cement-like substance.
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