Energy Secretary Rick Perry made his first trip to the Hanford Site on Tuesday, touring facilities that will be used to treat radioactive waste left over from Cold War-era plutonium production.
The former Texas governor walked through the Pretreatment Facility for the Waste Treatment Plant that Bechtel National is building to convert up to 56 million gallons of waste into a glass form that is safe for permanent storage. Speaking to Hanford Site workers, he also lauded the “great strides” being made in direct-feed low-activity waste, intended to enable treatment of such waste as early as 2022.
Perry’s trip to Richland, Wash., also included stops at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and HAMMER Federal Training Center.
Since taking office in March, Perry has visited a number of facilities in the DOE complex. During an at-times contentious budget hearing in June, he expressed his eagerness to walk around the Hanford Site, leading Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to note that the complex is quite large – 586 square miles.
During his trip Tuesday, Perry did not commit to sustain present funding levels for the massive Hanford cleanup program, the Tri-City Herald reported.
“I never get too spun up on initial budgets,” he said, according to KUOW. “What my goal is to make sure we have funding that gets the job done.”
The Energy Department’s budget proposal for fiscal 2018 would provide about $2.2 billion for the Hanford Site, not including security expenses. However, funding for DOE’s Richland Operations Office, which oversees remediation of the site’s River Corridor and Central Plateau, would be cut by $124 million, to $716 million. The Office of River Protection, charged with oversight of liquid waste operations, would get an extra $5 million, to $1.5 billion.
Appropriators in the House and Senate have sought to restore the funding for Hanford cleanup.
