The White House’s proposed budget cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency would dramatically delay the end of nuclear cleanup at the Hanford Site, the head of Washington state’s nuclear cleanup oversight program told lawmakers Wednesday in a Capitol Hill hearing.
Hanford has “historically stood out for the slow pace of cleanup,” and the pace would only slow further if the Donald Trump administration’s proposed cuts to EPA — a year-over-year reduction of roughly 30 percent to about $5.5 billion — become law for fiscal 2018, Alexandra Smith, Nuclear Waste Program manager for the Washington Department of Ecology, told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
The Energy Department owns the Hanford Site and performs the physical cleanup work there, but the Washington Ecology Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are the lead regulators at the facility. The state grants DOE permits for certain cleanup activities, while EPA has final regulatory say over remediation of Hanford’s four Superfund areas: priority cleanup zones that fall within the agency’s jurisdiction under the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA.
Smith said the Trump administration’s proposal to slash the Superfund budget more than 40 percent to just over $760 million in fiscal 2018, which begins Oct. 1, would cripple the EPA’s ability to perform the complex, technical reviews at Hanford that enable the state and its federal partner to enforce federal cleanup laws there.
Remediation at Hanford is slated to cost $120 billion to complete and take until 2070 at the current rate of funding, Smith said, adding that some of the more pessimistic projections she has seen would keep cleanup going “well into, like, the year 3,000.”
Such a delay “absolutely does not seem unfathomable to me,” Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) told Smith.
Hanford covers nearly 600 square miles of high desert in south-central and southeast Washington state. The site produced and processed plutonium for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal during the Cold War arms race with the former Soviet Union.
The Trump administration’s proposed EPA cuts were part of the budget blueprint released earlier this month, and which also called for increasing DOE’s nuclear cleanup budget in the Office of Environmental Management by more than 5 percent to $6.5 billion.
