For the second time in two weeks, a senator from Washington state insisted Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm raise the Joe Biden administration’s financial commitment to long-term Hanford Site cleanup and continue payments to localities bordering Department of Energy nuclear facilities.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) hammered at the topics during Granholm’s Wednesday appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Energy and Water Development subcommittee to discuss the fiscal 2022 DOE budget request. The White House seeks almost $7.6 billion for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and nearly a third of the total would go toward Hanford.
“I remain concerned about the long- term projections for this site,” Murray said. A 2019 report from DOE during the Donald Trump administration projected a Hanford lifecycle cost of anywhere from $323 billion to $677 billion with final cleanup not finished until 2078.
Assuming the worst case proves accurate, Hanford would require about $11 billion per year over about 57 years, Murray said. While the lawmaker did not mention it, even the more optimistic scenario would still need average Hanford funding over the same span at more than double the $2.6 billion enacted by Congress for fiscal 2021 or the almost $2.5 billion requested by DOE in fiscal 2022.
The DOE and the national labs constantly look at ways to accelerate cleanup at an easier-to-swallow cost, Granholm said, but “right now I don’t have a silver bullet.”
As her colleague, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), did last week before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Murray pressed Granholm for more money to deal with “a laundry list” of projects at Hanford and questioned why DOE’s proposal slashes payments in lieu of taxes (PILT) at Hanford as well as the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The PILT funding is meant to compensate local communities supporting the nation’s nuclear arsenal who work on hundreds of square miles of land that cannot be taxed because it is federal property, Murray said.
“PILT funding has long been an issue here, and I want to be clear it cannot be eliminated or cut back in any way,” Murray said. The lawmaker also asked Granholm to explain the rationale for curtailing PILT.
To this Granholm said “historically” administrations request budgets that do not include PILT, but Congress subsequently inserts it. “We would like to see it included in the [administration] budget,” going forward, Murray said.
