A broken deal at Hanford

Wehad a deal.

But the Bush administration is reneging on the commitment it made to Washington state to clean up Cold War-era nuclear-defense wastes at Hanford.

How else to explain the astonishing quarter-billion-dollar budget cut the U.S. Department of Energy has proposed for the next fiscal year? Within five years, the agency wants to cut the budget in half — from the current $2 billion.

Energy Department officials deny they are backing off the 16-year-old Tri-Party Agreement — they are just working smarter and more efficiently. The pact between the Energy Department and state and federal regulatory agencies sets deadlines for cleanup of wastes amassed at the Southeastern Washington nuclear reservation.

Smarter and more efficient? If anything, the agency should be asking for more money, especially after experts raised concerns about the seismic design of the new vitrification plant. When it is finished, the plant will turn liquid waste into more-stable logs for long-term disposal. And what about money for resolving worker-safety concerns at the tank farms?

State regulators, analyzing the proposed budget's implications to cleanup, believe the federal government will start missing major deadlines by 2007.

Not if Rep. Doc Hastings and Sen. Maria Cantwell can help it. They are laying for a fight to restore the Hanford cleanup budget to a level where it can meet its milestones. In the past, Hastings, R-Pasco, who founded the bipartisan Nuclear Cleanup Caucus, has been able to persuade colleagues to appropriate more cleanup money than the Department of Energy requested.

Some observers speculate Washington state is being punished for its unwillingness to permit the Department of Energy to reclassify tank waste so a lower cleanup standard can be applied — and for a handful of lawsuits and the voter-approved Initiative 297, which would forbid shipment of wastes from other states until all Hanford waste is cleaned up.

But, as Hastings notes, the administration cited similar federal court uncertainty last year in an attempt to slow work at Hanford's tank farms, and Congress rejected that idea.

Lawsuits have been background noise at Hanford for years. Yet, meaningful cleanup is being accomplished. Hastings is right. Regardless of these disagreements, cleanup is the right thing to do.