Killing Hanford Cleanup Pact ‘Real Threat’ Senate Bill Would Halt Restoration, Strip Power From State Government

Gov. Mike Lowry and Attorney General Christine Gregoire are condemning a move in Congress to cut Washington state out of the Hanford cleanup.

A new Senate bill that would cancel the state’s Tri Party Agreement is “arrogant, naive and dangerous,” Gregoire said Friday.

“This bill poses a real threat to the environmental health of our region,” Lowry said.

The 1989 agreement between Washington state, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets timetables to clean up Hanford by the year 2028.

More than $8 billion has been spent so far to stabilize dangerous plutonium from decades of bomb-making, clean out defunct production buildings, and tame unstable waste tanks.

The Senate bill introduced by Louisiana Democrat J. Bennett Johnston and Alaska Republican Frank Murkowski would immediately kill the cleanup pact.

It would give the DOE two years to develop a new plan - preempting current cleanup standards.

It would also repeal segments of a 1992 federal law that give states power to issue fines and enforce their own cleanup standards, and reinstate the federal government’s legal immunity for lawsuits arising from cleanup.

That would take Hanford back to its Cold War days, when operations were secret and nuclear facilities didn’t have to comply with most environmental laws, Gregoire said.

“We would again be left with a selfregulating, ‘trust us’ Department of Energy,” Gregoire said.

“We trusted them once, and they betrayed that trust,” she said.

An environmental activist agreed.

“This congressional agenda is filled with hypocrisy,” said Jerry Pollett, executive director of Heart of America Northwest, a Seattle-based Hanford watchdog group.

“They talk of returning power to the states, but not with Hanford. They are trying to send us back to the days where they could poison our air and water without any oversight or regulation,” Pollett said.

The Northwest congressional delegation is united against the bill. State officials, worried about the political clout of the two sponsors, are counterattacking.

Last month, Gregoire convened a meeting in Washington, D.C., of 17 attorneys general from states with defense facilities.

The group is working on legislation that will be introduced with the help of Northwest politicians, including Sens. Patty Murray and Slade Gorton.

It will include some regulatory reforms, possibly including a single regulator at Hanford to streamline cleanup.

“We think that regulator should be the state,” Gregoire said.

In an interview Thursday, Murray blasted Murkowski’s bill and his recent proposal to make Hanford a temporary storage site for spent fuel from the nation’s commercial nuclear reactors.

Murkowski’s new chairmanship of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is “the worst thing for Washington that happened in the last election,” she said.

Washington officials want to testify at a June 15 hearing on the Murkowski-Johnston bill. They aren’t sure they’ll get the chance.

In March, when Murkowski accepted a critical Hanford report commissioned by Johnston, he didn’t allow state officials to testify, Gregoire said.

“We have some concerns that will happen again,” she said.

The report, “Train Wreck Along the River of Money,” was especially critical of the Tri Party Agreement. It said Hanford is “floundering in a legal and regulatory morass.”

The hearing schedule hasn’t been completed, a Murkowski aide said.

, DataTimes