McCain says funds for Hanford are wasted

The nearly $2 billion in stimulus money being spent on environmental cleanup at the Hanford nuclear reservation made a list of questionable spending released Tuesday by Republican Sen. John McCain.

"Hanford nuclear site gets billions for failed cleanup effort," said the stimulus checklist that the former presidential candidate prepared with fellow Republican Sen. Tom Coburn.

The list included 100 projects, with Hanford at No. 10, which the senators said represented "billions of dollars of stimulus funding that have been wasted, mismanaged or directed toward silly and shortsighted projects."

But Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who fought to get the money for Hanford, dismissed McCain's list as "political posturing of the worst kind."

And it's flat out wrong, Murray said in a statement.

Hanford is extensively contaminated with radioactive and hazardous chemicals left from producing the majority of the nation's plutonium for nuclear weapons during World War II and the Cold War.

The site was picked to receive $1.96 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money because it had contractors in place that could quickly begin hiring hundreds of people for what the government called "shovel-ready" projects at the 586-square-mile site.

In addition, the work was planned to shrink the contaminated portion of the nuclear reservation, thus reducing the costs for maintenance and security at obsolete buildings and contaminated waste sites.

The Department of Energy has estimated the money spent at Hanford will avoid at least $2 billion in inflation increases and maintenance and surveillance costs.

"The effort has been plagued by massive cost and schedule problems -- and almost no progress," claimed the McCain-Coburn report.

It cited delays and cost increases in building Hanford's massive Waste Treatment Plant, which will treat the worst of the site's radioactive waste and vitrify it into glass for permanent disposal. McCain-Coburn also pointed out that none of Hanford's 177 underground tanks holding high-level radioactive waste, much of which will be treated at the vitrification plant, has been permanently closed.

However, most of the economic stimulus money is being spent on projects that Hanford workers have shown they can do well. That includes tearing down buildings and digging up contaminated buried waste rather than the technically challenging and sometimes first-of-a-kind work that the report cites as examples of waste.

About $326 million also will be used to prepare for treatment of the waste, including preparing a system to transfer waste to the vitrification plant.

Murray said the McCain-Coburn report mischaracterizes overall cleanup efforts and ignores significant progress.

Republican Rep. Doc Hastings of Eastern Washington agreed with Murray that the Hanford work is not waste.

"It's often an uphill battle to convince others of the funds required to meet commitments at Hanford and at other cleanup sites," Hastings said.

Hanford has had a productive year, with the vitrification plant construction and engineering reaching the 50 percent completed mark and cleanup along the Columbia River ahead of schedule and under budget, he said.

Hanford cleanup was included on the McCain-Coburn report with other smaller examples of potentially wasteful spending, such as money for dinner cruises, golf courses, puppet shows and stimulus road signs.

Although the report didn't reference it, a Hanford project that used $300,000 in federal stimulus money to hire a helicopter to survey for radioactive hot spots also has drawn criticism. It's been used as an example of wasteful spending in dozens of mostly conservative-leaning blogs, most pointing out that the government is searching for radioactive rabbit droppings.

Rabbits and other animals were attracted to the radioactive salts in liquid waste discharged into the ground during the Cold War. The sites were sealed to keep out animals in 1969, but not before animals that ate the salts had spread radioactive droppings across as much as 13.7 square miles of sage-covered land near central Hanford. More waste was spread by the wind.

The helicopter surveying was done to find hot spots so they could be dug up to prevent further spreading radioactive contamination. A previous plan to survey the area with ground crews would have cost $700,000 more than the helicopter survey and taken longer, according to CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., the contractor for the project.

Among the concerns about stimulus funding is that projects "may not produce the types of jobs that most Americans had hoped for or expected," the McCain-Coburn report said.

But the Tri-City Development Council says the Hanford spending is the poster child for stimulus spending.

"We can show accomplishments and actual hiring," said Gary Petersen, TRIDEC vice chairman of Hanford programs.

DOE projections estimate an additional 1,400 workers, as measured by full-time equivalents, at Hanford in 2010 because of stimulus money.

If the additional work created for Hanford cleanup is measured including all subcontracts, such as those supplying additional goods to the site and manufacturing equipment needed there, about 2,500 additional jobs have been created or saved so far, DOE says.

"It's easy to launch attacks from Washington, D.C., on Hanford cleanup when you have no understanding of its importance to the region's people, economy, environment and future," Murray said.

"Sens. McCain and Coburn have not met the people who have been put back to work by this funding, have not seen the boost to local businesses and clearly don't understand the legal and moral obligation we have to getting this job done," she said.

The two senators are welcome to visit Hanford anytime to see the environmental cleanup progress being made and meet some of the 2,500 people hired with the stimulus money, said DOE spokeswoman Colleen French.

w Annette Cary: 582-1533; acary@tricityherald.com