Last week I wrote a couple of posts about the public presentation by representatives of the U.S. Department of Energy and Washington State with respect to the cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. In the blog posts, I mentioned that there was a serious legal conflict between the U.S. DoE and Washington over the cleanup of all the radioactive wastes polluting the site from decades of work on nuclear weapons for the United States arsenal.
In 2010, a Federal Court consent decree had set strict milestones for the cleanup. Since then, the U.S. DoE has said that the required actions could not be carried out on the required schedule because of the scientific complexity of the situation at Hanford. It proposed that the hard deadlines for specific action in the consent decree be replaced with "future unspecified milestones to be set on an open-ended rolling basis." Washington State had been threatening to take the U.S. DoE back to court to force the U.S. DoE to carry out the work on the schedule set by the court. Washington State also proposed a new set of deadlines and demanded that all cleanup work be carried out by 2047.
On Friday of last week, the State and the Federal government rejected each other's proposals. The U.S. DoE proposal had requested the elimination of many of the deadlines included in the Federal Court decision. This was totally unacceptable to the State and the State rejected the U.S. DoE proposal. Later in the day, the U.S. Justice Department sent a letter to the Washington State Department of Ecology. In the letter, the Justice Department rejected the Washington State proposal to accelerate the cleanup. The U.S. DoE had said that the Washington State proposal ignored technical realities and budget problems at the U.S. DoE.
One major problem at Hanford concerns the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) which I have covered in previous blog posts. The Waste Treatment Plant is intended to incorporate the waste from the underground tanks in glass logs which will then be buried. Construction on the plant was halted because the original design did not take into accounts corrosion in the pipes and hydrogen gas buildup. There has been extensive redesign for the plant including the creation of whole new processing stages and alternative processing pathways. The consent decree requires that the WTP be fully operational by 2022.
The U.S. DoE has said that " setting deadlines that likely will be missed creates false expectations in the community and with the State, and erodes confidence in the cleanup work." The cleanup has been in process for decades and has been repeatedly plagued by incompetence, illegal behavior on the part of U.S. DoE, accidents, lies and missed deadlines. At this point, I don't think that there is much confidence left in the community and the State. Washington State has the option of invoking a forty day process of negotiation as provided for in the consent decree. If an agreement between U.S. DoE and the State of Washington cannot be reached in such negotiations, then Washington State may request that the Federal Court order the U.S. DoE to adhere to the State proposal. Given the history of Hanford, I would not be surprised to see this case back in Federal Court.\
