President Trump’s proposed first federal budget for cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation falls far short of what the state says is needed.
Hanford’s fiscal 2024 budget, which ended last September, was $3.035 billion. The feds budgeted $3.070 billion for fiscal 2025, which ends Sept. 30. Trump’s fiscal 2026 proposal calls for $3.070 billion.
However, the Washington Department of Ecology estimated that $3.79 billion would have been necessary in fiscal 2024 to meet Hanford’s legal cleanup schedules and standards. The department says that $4.56 billion is needed in fiscal 2025 to meet Hanford’s legal obligations, and $4.56 billion will be needed in fiscal 2026.
“The budget at Hanford is the largest in its history and it is still not enough,” said Simone Anter, an attorney with Columbia Riverkeeper, an environmental watchdog organization.
Nikolas Peterson, executive director of Hanford Challenge, another watchdog organization, agreed that budget shortfalls will slow cleanup. “If Hanford’s funding gets cut now, it is not going to save money in the long run,” he said.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-WA, was pointed in her criticism. “The president’s proposed budget for Hanford is utterly unacceptable and will be going nowhere as far as I am concerned. Trump’s proposal for Hanford would force us to fall behind on the cleanup mission at a critical time, leaving key milestones unmet and raising the cost of the cleanup in the long run — not to mention increasing the safety and environmental risks for the Tri-Cities,” she said in a written statement.
Both the state ecology department and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Richland office declined to comment on the budget figures recently released by the Trump administration.
The Trump budget proposal still has to go through the House and Senate. Murray, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-WA, and U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-WA 4, have long advocated keeping Hanford’s budget from being shortchanged in Congress.
“I will continue to fight to ensure this Administration understands and commits to supporting funding levels that will enable the federal government to meet its legal and moral clean-up obligations,” Cantwell said in a written statement. She advocated for meeting the milestones in the Tri-Party Agreement, a 1989 decommissioning plan signed off by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology.
Newhouse wrote: “As a member of the Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Department of Energy, I will continue to advocate for the resources Hanford needs to execute their mission and remain on schedule.”
Arguably the most radioactively and chemically contaminated spot in the Western hemisphere, the Hanford nuclear reservation’s cleanup is governed by the 35-year-old Tri-Party Agreement, plus other court orders and decrees. The state of Washington and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have repeatedly used this contract to force a sometimes foot-dragging U.S. Department of Energy to meet its legal standards and schedule to clean up the highly radioactive site.
The U.S. government set up Hanford in 1943 to create plutonium for the nation’s atomic bombs, including those exploded in New Mexico and over Nagasaki in 1945. That development work created many billions of gallons of chemical and radioactive wastes, the worst 56 million gallons of which were pumped into 177 underground tanks. About a third of those tanks leak. At least a million gallons of radioactive liquid have leaked into the ground, seeping into the aquifer 200 feet below and then into the Columbia River, roughly seven miles away.
The biggest cleanup project covers the 56 million gallons of tank wastes. Right now, Hanford is scheduled to begin converting the lesser radioactive wastes in the tanks into a benign glass to be eventually stored at an underground storage site, whose location is still undetermined. A low-activity waste glassification plant is scheduled to go online in August. A second plant to tackle high-level wastes will likely be operating in the 2030s. Since the low-activity waste plant will handle only 40 to 50 percent of the lesser wastes, Hanford recently decided to look into encasing the remaining low-activity materials into a cement-like substance.
Currently, Hanford’s legal target calls for glassifying all wastes by 2052. DOE has internally moved those targets back to 2069, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office. So far, the state and DOE have not adjusted the legal deadline on completing glassification.
Meanwhile, Hanford also has to deal with contaminated groundwater; numerous huge defunct processing plants that converted radioactive materials into plutonium; buried barrels of radioactive junk; and almost 2,000 canisters of cesium and strontium that are stored underwater.
The Trump administration has not yet publicly unveiled how its proposed 2026 Hanford budget is broken down by individual cleanup projects.
Meanwhile, the feds recently trimmed roughly 50 people from its 300 employees at DOE’s Richland headquarters. These people supervise and support the work of about 13,000 employees who tackle the actual cleanup. So far, only a handful of contractor workers have been laid off, but Peterson of Hanford Challenge is preparing for more.
“It’s naive to believe there will be no cuts to the contractors,” Peterson said.
