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The final version of the federal economic stimulus bill includes nearly $2 billion for Hanford cleanup -- enough to create or preserve close to 3,000 jobs, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said Wednesday.
As a House-Senate conference committee worked to complete negotiations, Murray said agreement had been reached on a final amount of $6 billion for cleanup at the Hanford nuclear reservation and other Department of Energy sites.
"It is just stunning," said Gary Petersen, vice president of the Tri-City Development Council. "The (heavy) lift that Patty Murray did on this one is simply astounding and took both our state senators to do."
The committee reconciled the $6.4 billion in the Senate bill with the $500 million the House approved, ending at the upper end of the range. The revised stimulus bill next must be approved by the full House and Senate and then go to President Obama for signing as soon as early next week.
DOE will decide how the $6 billion will be spent, but Murray believes a little less than $2 billion will go for cleanup at Hanford. That's in addition to almost $2 billion the site spends annually for cleanup.
Cleaning up DOE sites is the epitome of what the stimulus package is intended to do, Murray said in a phone call to the Herald. It creates immediate jobs and benefits the nation by saving money long term as the contaminated footprint of Hanford and other sites shrinks, she said.
She stressed that she fought to have almost all the money from the Senate bill retained in the final version, rather than splitting the difference between the House and Senate. In meetings in the House, Senate and White House, she said, "This is a must-have for me."
The stimulus bill also should include a significant amount of money for science, which will benefit the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Murray said.
The bill also has $3.25 billion in additional borrowing authority for the Bonneville Power Administration to upgrade power transmission to help bring wind energy on line.
"We are not able to get much of the wind power onto the grid because it's old, needs to be rebuilt and does not go to the right places," she said.
One project BPA has been considering is the 75-mile McNary-John Day transmission line, which would be built through southern Benton County.
At Hanford, officials have been preparing for the economic stimulus money. The needed processes, contracts and permits are in place, said Doug Shoop, deputy manager of the DOE Richland Operations Office, last week. In addition to hiring by DOE and its contractors to do the work, more subcontracts may be awarded.
Hanford officials also have prepared lists of the work on which they'd use the additional money. DOE wants to have 218 square miles near the Columbia River cleaned up by 2015 to leave just 75 square miles of contaminated land at the nuclear reservation's center.
More work to demolish buildings and dig up waste sites near the river, including near the K reactors, is planned using the stimulus money. Ground water cleanup could be increased near the river and in central Hanford.
Demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant could speed up, and more waste temporarily buried in central Hanford could be retrieved and prepared for shipment elsewhere. Debris that may be contaminated with plutonium, or transuranic waste, was temporarily buried until a national repository opens in New Mexico.
Also in central Hanford, DOE could do work to shrink the contaminated footprint smaller than 75 square miles by cleaning up waste sites along its perimeter.
The DOE Hanford Office of River Protection plans to use stimulus money for additional work at the tank farms and to support the vitrification plant. A top priority would be retrieving more radioactive waste from leak-prone underground tanks and closing those tanks.
Maintenance and upgrades are planned on equipment and buildings, both to make them last until cleanup is finished and to prepare to send waste to the vitrification plant for treatment beginning in 2019. DOE also would like to install a temporary barrier over the surface of another tank farm to keep precipitation and runoff from driving contamination deeper underground.
