YAKIMA — Washington state plans to sue the federal government after failing to reach a new cleanup agreement at the Hanford nuclear reservation.
The U.S. Department of Energy, which manages Hanford cleanup, and state officials entered negotiations in May 2007 over missed cleanup deadlines at the highly contaminated site.
The two sides have failed to reach an agreement, and the state notified Energy Department officials Monday night that it would file suit, according to a source with knowledge of the negotiations.
Gov. Chris Gregoire is scheduled to make an announcement about Hanford late this morning.
The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Today, it is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, with cleanup costs expected to top $60 billion.
Cleanup is governed by the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement, a pact signed by the state Department of Ecology, the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. The document has seen many modifications, but the latest negotiations included some of the most significant deadline changes since its inception.
Among the most significant projects is the vitrification plant, which is being built to convert millions of gallons of radioactive waste into glasslike logs for permanent disposal underground. Long considered the cornerstone of Hanford cleanup, the project lags eight years behind schedule and is billions of dollars over budget. The current price tag is $12.2 billion, and the operating date is 2019, far beyond the mandated 2011.
Related to the plant is a project to retrieve waste that will be processed there. About 53 million gallons of radioactive brew sits in 177 underground tanks, some of which are known to have leaked into the aquifer, threatening the nearby Columbia River.
The deadlines proposed in the negotiations would have delayed tank waste cleanup by 24 years to 2052.
Under the current Tri-Party Agreement, the entire Hanford site was to be cleaned up by 2035.
A ballooning federal deficit also has raised concerns that money for Hanford cleanup won’t be as readily available. In recent years, Hanford has received about $2 billion each year toward cleanup — one-third of the federal government’s entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally, though the agency oversees nuclear cleanup in 14 states.
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