On Nov. 2, the Department of Energy's inspector general, Gregory Friedman, delivered a fairly critical report on Department of Energy's use of stimulus funds.

The investigation into American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spending came at the behest of the House Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight and Government Spending.

While the report validated some of the concerns regarding stimulus funds, the bright spot in the report was cleanup of the weapons complex sites under DOE's Office of Environmental Management.

Here in the Tri-Cities and Hanford, we should be applauding DOE, its contractors and subcontractors, and especially the workers who labored, safely, through the past 30-plus months.

For those of us who regularly visit the Hanford site, cleanup progress has been measurable, easy to see and remarkable.

As Matt McCormick, manager of DOE's Richland office, said, "We did almost $4 billion worth of cleanup work, for $1.96 billion in funding."

The savings come from demolishing buildings and digging up contaminated soil instead of paying for monitoring and maintenance of facilities to prevent the spread of hazardous materials, as well as getting work done at today's prices instead of tomorrow's (cost of cleanup inflation is about 2.5 percent per year).

I don't believe any other site can beat Hanford's success for the amount of work accomplished in the past three years.

The statistics here are commendable and rather astonishing. Contractors and subcontractors created a peak of more than 2,500 new full-time jobs in 2011, the active footprint of the site was reduced by 385 square miles (66 percent), more than 70 buildings were demolished, millions of tons of contaminated soil were moved to the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility on Hanford's central plateau and the amount of contaminated groundwater being treated doubled.

Every one of the 3,800 individuals hired had to be trained to work safely in very hazardous environments, and that training was due in large part to the incredible worker-trainers at HAMMER.

Drive by Hanford's 300 Area and look at the old building signs attached to the fence along Stevens Drive. These are all from buildings that have been demolished, including the landmark gray dome of the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor.

Out at N Reactor, for a short period of time this fall, the entire front face of the reactor was visible to anyone on the river before final cocooning got under way.

In the central plateau, removing all the plutonium from the Plutonium Finishing Plant and eliminating the security work force as the building was readied for decontamination and demolition took a major effort.

More than 800 million gallons of water were treated in a single year at the site, and more than 1.7 billion gallons will be treated in 2012.

As I like to tell community groups -- for the first time, I feel like I can reach out and touch the end of cleanup. To be more specific, 90 percent of the land at Hanford will be cleaned up by 2015, and the active footprint will be condensed to the central plateau -- less than 50 square miles of the original 586 square miles.

The river corridor, which includes the 300 Area and all nine of the production reactor sites along the Columbia River, is nearly clean. The river and the environment are being protected.

Hanford cleanup is not done, and Hanford cleanup isn't going away. The tank farms and waste treatment plant operations, also very complex work, will still be under way at Hanford for nearly 50 years. This work will be done on the greatly condensed central plateau, in the middle of the original Hanford Site.

But for this moment, we should recognize, and cheer, what is being accomplished in cleaning up the legacy wastes at Hanford.

While our community is working through the loss of 2,000 jobs, we are hopeful that we can maintain the base funding of the DOE Environmental Management budget.

We thank our congressional offices for continuing to understand that even in these tough budget times, the nation has a legal and moral obligation to continue funding cleanup of these highly hazardous wastes.

The achievements above are proof the funding is being well spent, and it sets the stage for further economic development of the site and our community.

-- Gary Petersen is the Tri-City Development Council's vice president for Hanford programs. The Department of Energy's inspector general report on the use of stimulus funds is available online at tinyurl.com/Hanford-Stimulus.