Agency seeking Hanford waste options

Associated Press

RICHLAND — The Department of Energy will proceed with its surprise plan not to glassify 75 percent of Hanford’s most lethal nuclear tank wastes, according to the agency’s top cleanup official.

The proposal to eliminate a longstanding plan to convert much of the waste into glass form for long-term storage became public last month when an internal memo was leaked to the Hanford Advisory Board.

"It’s a serious proposal, no doubt about it," said Jesse Roberson, the Energy Department’s nuclear waste cleanup czar, in a telephone interview with the Tri-City Herald.

Details about possible alternatives to melting the wastes into glassified form remain years away, she told the newspaper in a Friday story. That means approval by regulators is also years away, if ever.

The state Department of Ecology wants to see a proposal on paper before discussing the idea.

"If this becomes an excuse for stalling (on cleanup), we won’t go along with it," said Sheryl Hutchison, a spokeswoman for the Ecology Department.

The proposal is part of a sweeping, nationwide overhaul of plans for cleaning up the radioactive and toxic mess left by Cold War nuclear weapons production. Officials at Energy Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., are racing toward a Dec. 31 deadline to finish a review of the existing $300 billion, 70-year nationwide cleanup plan.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham wants to trim that by $100 billion and 30 years.

Tackling the wastes in 177 underground tanks at Hanford is the Energy Department’s single most expensive cleanup problem, Roberson said.

For now, the department is going ahead with plans to treat the most radioactive 10 percent of Hanford’s 53 million gallons of tank wastes as soon as Hanford’s glassification plant is built, Roberson said. The schedule calls for the initial glassification complex to begin operating in 2007 and run at full speed from 2011 to 2018.

Roberson’s proposal means the Energy Department would hunt for at least two faster and cheaper alternatives to treat the remaining 90 percent of Hanford’s tank wastes.

The Energy Department has no estimate of savings from the proposal, nor has it set a timetable to find alternatives to glassification, she said.

Another question is whether the proposal would violate the department’s legal obligations at Hanford.

"The reality is that I’m not sure what the legal ramifications are," Roberson said.

The Tri-Party Agreement, the pact between the state and federal governments that sets deadlines for Hanford’s cleanup, calls for all of the site’s tank wastes to be glassified.

Associated Press