Board: Hanford deadline extensions too extreme

The Hanford Advisory Board is leery of extending legal deadlines for much of the environmental cleanup work in central Hanford and along the Columbia River.

The Department of Energy has proposed changing 64 milestones, or deadlines, in the Tri-Party Agreement.

The board complained that none of the changes would speed up work, and some projects would be delayed almost a decade.

The new deadlines would provide “only losses in the form of delays and no benefits in the form of accelerated cleanup projects,” the board said in a letter to DOE and its regulators.

Central Hanford has about 400 buildings and about 1,500 waste sites where contaminated material was dumped, spilled or leaked into the soil.

DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Ecology have long known that focusing on cleanup at Hanford along the Columbia River in recent years would mean delays in cleanup work in central Hanford.

The three agencies negotiated an agreement with deadlines for the next phase of cleanup — excluding work to empty Hanford’s storage tanks and treat the waste for disposal — that they believed was realistic based on slightly higher Hanford budgets.

They propose extending by almost a decade — to 2024 — the current 2016 deadline for completing investigations and screening possible cleanup methods for many of the central Hanford buildings and waste sites.

The date by which cleanup would be required to be completed is listed as “to be determined.”

The deadline for DOE to say when three large processing plants — PUREX, REDOX and B Plant — would be required to be cleaned up would be extended from 2022 to mid-2026.

The board is not having it.

“There is nothing impossible, nor impractical, about accomplishing remediation under the original TPA (Tri-Party Agreement) milestones, utilizing technology that is currently available,” the advisory board said in the letter.

Delays negotiated in the proposed new milestones “were too easily pushed out using insufficient funding as an excuse, rather than proposing more stringent cleanup deadlines to make the case for more funding,” the board said.

The proposed new deadlines also do not reflect the urgency of cleanup, the board said. They seem to assume that contaminants in the ground and in groundwater will stay put during the proposed delays, rather than migrating and posing more risk.

It called for more stringent deadlines to demonstrate the priority of cleanup work to Congress and make Congress more likely to provide adequate funding to Hanford.

It objected to the “to be determined” dates, as did many people who attended public hearings on the proposed changes earlier this winter in Washington and Oregon.

“The goal should be to establish specific, achievable milestones within a process that allows for changing milestones, when necessary,” the board said.

It also objected to delaying the cleanup deadline for the 324 Building near Richland and the highly radioactive spill beneath it by three years.

“Extremely high radiation levels and proximity to the Columbia River and to the people living within the boundary of the city of Richland morally obligates near-term action,” the letter from the board said.

The state of Oregon also has sent a letter to DOE, saying that the proposed delays have been anticipated, but the length of delays caught it by surprise.

Those deadlines listed as “to be determined” would likely slip by an additional two or three decades, the state of Oregon said.

The Tri-Party agencies should take their best shot at developing realistic deadlines, even if they will cause major concern, the state said. The public needs to understand the expected length of delays.

It also questioned whether DOE’s plans to complete three major projects at the same time in 2021 are realistic. Plans call for demolishing U Plant, cleaning up the high-hazard 618-11 Burial Ground, and digging up the spill beneath the 324 Building and demolishing the building.

The public comment period on the proposed changes recently ended.

This story was originally published February 17, 2016 at 9:14 PM with the headline "Board: Hanford deadline extensions too extreme."