In a court document released Friday, a federal judge scolded the Energy Department for trying to drag out a long-running lawsuit brought to settle cleanup deadlines for 56 million gallons of radioactive waste buried at a former plutonium production facility in Richland, Wash.
The document was one of several released late Friday after Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington gave the agency and its contractor, Bechtel National of San Francisco, until 2036 to start cleaning up the most highly contaminated portion of the waste stored in underground tanks at DOE’s Hanford Site. That amounts to a 17-year deadline extension.
But on March 9, just two days before Peterson’s decision, DOE asked the court to remove Suzanne Dahl-Crumpler, a 20-year veteran of the Washington state Ecology Department’s Nuclear Waste Program, from an advisory panel formed to give Peterson technical advice about problems surrounding the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) Bechtel is building to clean up the Hanford waste.
WTP’s technical hurdles had the state and DOE deadlocked over how far into the future to shift cleanup deadlines. DOE argued Dahl-Crumper, who helped craft the state’s proposed deadline changes, was too biased to provide objective information, and was at any rate barred from what amounted to a paid consulting gig with the court under Washington state ethics laws.
The state disagreed on both counts and said as much in a Feb. 12 letter to the U.S. Justice Department that DOE appended to its March 9 motion to give Dahl-Crumper the boot.
Peterson, in a scathing rebuke issued Friday criticized DOE for raising its latest objections “in such an untimely manner.”
“The Court views DOE’s repeated, baseless objections to Ms. Dahl-Crumpler as evidence of wasting time and resources on DOE’s part, as well as forcing Washington and the Court to waste time and resources in dealing with DOE’s objections,” Peterson wrote in a order quashing DOE’s motion to disqualify Dahl-Crumpler from service.
Prior to the modifications Peterson approved on Friday, Bechtel was supposed to turn WTP over to DOE by 2019, at which point the facility was to be capable of turning both high- and low-level liquid waste into more easily storable tubes of radioactive glass.
Washington state and DOE have for years agreed the 2019 deadline was not realistic, and that with modifications, WTP could start treating less-contaminated, low-level Hanford waste by 2022. The parties, though, disagreed on a start date for high-level waste cleanup: Washington state wanted this work to begin by 2034, while DOE asked for a 2039 start.
