Hanford to Get $1.96 Billion - Creating more jobs!

March 31st, 2009 2:21 PM

Richland Hanford will receive $1.96 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to accelerate cleanup of the nuclear reservation and create jobs.

Officials had been expecting Hanford to receive close to $2 billion and Energy Secretary Steven Chu confirmed that this morning as he announced $6 billion would be spent on Department of Energy environmental cleanup work in 12 states.

The DOE Hanford Richland Operations Office will receive $1.635 billion for work to clean up central Hanford and the river corridor.

That work will include demolishing old buildings, digging up waste sites and contaminated soil, and cleaning up and protecting ground water.

The other DOE Hanford office, the Office of River Protection, will receive the remainder of the money, $326 million.

The money will be used for projects to prepare for the treatment at the vitrification plant starting in 2019 of millions of gallons of high level radioactive waste held in underground tanks.

Projects include speeding of the design for a temporary storage facility for waste once it is turned into a stable glass form at the vit plant, making improvements to the 222-S Analytical Laboratory and constructing systems to transfer the waste to the vitrification plant.

The money also will be used to develop programs to make sure that leak-prone single-shell tanks will be sound enough to hold waste until it can be treated.

“These investments will put Americans to work while cleaning up contamination from the Cold War era,” Chu said in a statement. “It reflects our commitment to future generations as well as to help local economies get moving again.”

For the full story, see Wednesday’s Herald.

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