Omnibus bill would increase Hanford spending

The Hanford budget for the current year would be just shy of $2 billion under the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Bill made public Monday.

The bill also includes $71.2 million to complete the Physical Sciences Facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland ahead of schedule.

The Hanford nuclear reservation money would be an increase of $146.5 million above the amount proposed by the Bush administration last year. Hanford has been operating under a continuing resolution passed by Congress since Oct. 1, the start of fiscal 2009, because no budget has been approved for the Department of Energy.

"The Bush administration left a hole in Hanford funding," said Sen. Patty Murray, in a statement. "We are now beginning to climb out of it."

Murray worked for Hanford, the national lab and other Tri-City funding as a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The additional money for Hanford would help with emptying leak-prone underground tanks of radioactive waste, demolishing the Plutonium Finishing Plant, protecting and cleaning ground water and cleaning up Hanford along the Columbia River.

With the stimulus bill signed by President Obama last week, that will speed up Hanford cleanup, said Gary Petersen, the Tri-City Development Council vice president for Hanford programs. The stimulus bill includes an estimated extra $2 billion to be used on Hanford cleanup over the next several years.

"It's really a case of pay now or pay more later for Hanford cleanup," he said.

The bill is expected to be voted on in the House this week and in the Senate next week. It's a compromise between a House version of the bill that included a $31.5 million increase for Hanford over the Bush proposal and the Senate version that included a $222 million increase.

Total funding for the DOE Hanford Office of River Protection, which is in charge of the tank farms and the vit plant, would be just over $1 billion.

The tank farms at Hanford, where 53 million gallons of radioactive waste are held in underground tanks, would receive a $31.5 million increase. It would be used to empty leak-prone tanks and also to help the Department of Energy develop a plan to treat some of the tanks' low activity radioactive waste.

The vitrification plant under construction received no additional money because it's being paid for under a plan to appropriate a steady rate of $690 million a year.

The DOE Hanford Richland Operations Office would receive about $967 million this year for the rest of Hanford cleanup. That's a $115 million increase from the Bush proposal.

The largest portion of it, almost $67 million, would be used to help clean up Hanford along the Columbia River by 2015. An increase of $12.9 million would be spent to protect ground water and clean up contaminated ground water to prevent it from polluting the Columbia River.

The bill includes $22.5 million more for solid waste cleanup in central Hanford, which includes digging up transuranic waste, or waste contaminated with plutonium that was temporarily buried until the nation had a national repository for it open in New Mexico.

The bill also includes $9 million more to ramp up demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant in central Hanford.

The additional money for the Richland Operations Office should help DOE meet most of its legally binding Tri-Party Agreement deadlines there, said Murray's staff.

Although money for the HAMMER training center and for B Reactor, which supporters are working to save as a museum, are not included in specific amounts in the bill, DOE has been instructed to continue to pay for those projects out of its overall budget. The bill does include some money to improve the road to B Reactor.

The money included for construction of the Physical Sciences Facility at the national lab in Richland completes the DOE obligation to help pay for the building two years ahead of schedule.

The bill includes $52.8 million from the DOE Office of Science and $18.5 million from the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration. The money would be combined with $25 million Murray included in the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill.

The facility is being built to partially replace aging lab facilities in Hanford's 300 Area that the national lab must vacate by 2011 to allow Hanford cleanup.

"The Physical Sciences Facility is a critical part of PNNL's mission to safeguard our nation and build our energy future," Murray said.