In a court document released March 11, 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 last week 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 Malouf 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 the judge technical advice about problems surrounding the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) Bechtel is building to process the Hanford waste for disposal.
WTP’s technical hurdles left the state and DOE deadlocked over how far into the future to shift cleanup deadlines. DOE argued Dahl-Crumpler, 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-Crumpler the boot.
Malouf Peterson, in a scathing rebuke issued March 11, sided with the state, criticizing 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,” Malouf Peterson wrote in a order quashing DOE’s motion to disqualify Dahl-Crumpler from service.
DOE acknowledged in its March 9 filing that kicking out Dahl-Crumpler “may necessitate a delay of ongoing activities of the panel” on which she served. Malouf Peterson chafed at that suggestion, writing in her denial that she had spoken with the panel earlier this year for only about seven hours, and had not intended to summon the three experts again before issuing her ruling Friday.
Prior to the modifications the judge approved on March 11, 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.
The two sides have been in court over remediation deadlines at the site since 2008, when the state sued DOE for blowing deadlines in the nearly 30-year-old Tri-Party Agreement that governs Hanford cleanup. That suit was settled in 2010, when a judge handed down a consent decree with new cleanup dates. DOE blew those deadlines as well, precipitating in 2014 the court case that closed March 11.
The agency and Washington state have 30 days to agree on any mutual changes to the now-modified consent decree. Until then, DOE is keeping its thoughts about the ruling close to the vest.
“The department is in the process of reviewing the legal paperwork regarding the court order and the consent decree,” DOE Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Monica Regalbuto told members of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Tuesday. “I’d be happy to come back once they dissect all of that in the 30-day period.”
