10:45
Associated Press
SPOKANE — The Trump administration is proposing a $230 million cut in cleanup spending at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in fiscal 2019.
The budget request released on Monday cuts $61 million from the budget for Hanford’s Office of River Protection, and $169 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Richland Operations Office.
The two offices would receive about $2.1 billion combined for the fiscal year.
Hanford for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons. The site near Richland is now engaged in cleaning up a huge volume of radioactive and hazardous wastes left from plutonium production.
Critics have said Hanford’s budget must be dramatically increased to some $3 billion a year to achieve legal cleanup milestones.
Nationwide, the budget calls for spending $6.6 billion on environmental cleanup of Cold War wastes.
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