The advisory board to the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state meets today at 9 a.m. Pacific Time and will hear updates on Tri-Party Agreement cleanup plans.
Brian Vance, manager of DOE’s Richland Operations Office and Office of River Protection at the former plutonium production facility, is among the speakers scheduled to address the online meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board.
Speakers from the Washington state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are also scheduled to present.
All year, DOE and Washington officials have been conducting what the state calls “holistic” discussions about Hanford cleanup deadlines. The coronavirus pandemic has compounded technical difficulties with the Waste Treatment Immobilization Plant, which DOE has said may not be ready to process high-level radioactive waste from Hanford’s tank farms by 2036: a legally binding deadline, under a 2016 consent decree.
Today is the first of two scheduled days of online meetings for the Hanford Advisory Board, a non-partisan, DOE-charted panel that seeks to develop consensus policy recommendations and advice for the government agencies involved in cleanup of the shuttered eastern-Washington production site.
The meeting link can be found here and the access code is 171-499-709.
