Stimulus package includes Hanford cleanup money

An economic stimulus package approved Wednesday by Congress includes nearly $6 billion for cleaning up former Cold War-era weapons sites nationwide. About one third of that is expected to be spent at the Hanford nuclear reservation, the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.

The U.S. Department of Energy will make the final decision on how much money will be spent where, but the additional money for cleaning up southeast Washington's Hanford is a clear victory, said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

"This has been a top priority for me because it fits the bill of what President Obama wanted, which is to create jobs in the short term and to better our country in the future," Murray said. "This will create literally thousands of jobs at the site and help to reduce the footprint of (nuclear) sites around the country."

Congress and the White House agreed Wednesday on a compromise $790 billion economic stimulus bill designed to create millions of jobs in a nation reeling from recession. Obama could sign the measure within days.

The measure includes $483 million for nondefense cleanup, typically small sites and laboratories that supported defense efforts. Another $390 million would go to uranium enrichment programs.

The remaining $5.1 billion of the weapons sites cleanup money would be spent on defense sites around the country.

The most challenging among them is Hanford, created by the federal government in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Cleanup costs there are expected to top $50 billion.

Each year, the federal government spends roughly $2 billion - about one-third of the total cleanup budget nationally - to rid the site of toxic and radioactive waste.

But late last year, the Energy Department announced it would miss 23 cleanup deadlines in 2009 because there was insufficient money in the 2009 budget.

The department has announced a goal of shrinking the overall cleanup area from its current 586 square miles to just 75 square miles by 2015.

In an earlier interview, David Brockman, the Energy Department's manager overseeing Hanford cleanup from the Richland Operations Office, agreed some work could be accelerated with additional money. He cited work to pump-and-treat contaminated groundwater and efforts to retrieve highly radioactive waste from the site's central plateau.

Work has been slowed in that area due to a lack of money because it is farther from the Columbia River, which runs along the site's northern and eastern borders and is an area where cleanup is a top priority.

Washington's congressional delegation still must continue to fight for sufficient annual cleanup money in upcoming budget discussions, Murray said.

Gary Petersen, vice president of a regional economic development group, the Tri-City Development Council, said he doesn't yet know exactly how much money will go to Hanford cleanup. But he's anticipating about $1.8 billion, which he said could result in 3,000 additional jobs over a 24-36-month period.

"The economists have all said that typically one job at Hanford is worth about 1.8 additional jobs in the local community," he said. "Those are pretty good numbers."