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311 Appendix C The Hanford Waste Cleanup Agreement and Program This overview of the Hanford cleanup agreement and program for the Hanford facility, which contains the largest volume of HLW of any DOE facility, provides a concrete picture of the legal and programmatic elements of DOE cleanup efforts. The Hanford Tri-Party Agreement DOE, EPA, and the Washington State Department of Ecology entered into the Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order, commonly known as the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA), for cleanup at the Hanford site in 1989.1 The first such agreement for a DOE facility, it was promoted as the flagship of DOE’s waste cleanup efforts.2 Since the original accord, the agreement has been modified more than four hundred times by mutual agreement of the parties.3 Further cleanup requirements are specified in the Hanford Federal Facility Site-Wide Permit, the facility’s RCRA permit, jointly issued by EPA and the Washington Department of Ecology.4 The Hanford TPA defines and ranks CERCLA and RCRA cleanup commitments, defines the responsibilities of the parties, sets forth a budgeting process, and provides arrangements for public information and involvement.5 The TPA also provides an elaborate dispute settlement procedure with set time­ tables. For CERCLA disputes, the final decision is made by the regional EPA administrator with the possibility of review by the EPA administrator in Washington, D.C., if DOE determines that there are “significant national policy implications.”6 Disputes relating to RCRA are referred to the director of the Washington State Department of Ecology for a final decision. DOE can appeal such a decision to the courts.7 The TPA also stipulates money damages for breaches by DOE of the requirements that it establishes. For example, if DOE misses a deadline, the agreement stipulates a $5,000 penalty for the first week and $10,000 for each additional week. In the event of a CERCLA-related breach, the fine is paid to EPA. Fines related to RCRA are paid to the State of Washington .8 Citizens may also seek to enforce the agreement through judicial actions under RCRA Section 7002(a)(1)(A).9 The TPA enforcement provisions have been invoked many times. DOE has been assessed stipulated penalties on several occasions.10 For example, it was assessed penalties of $270,000 in 2004 and $1.1 million in 2007.11 The dispute settlement process has been invoked in a few instances.12 For example, in 1998, the procedures for settlement of a dispute over one of the TPA cleanup schedules resulted in schedule modifications 312 Fuel Cycle to Nowhere that were then noticed for public comment.13 Even with these procedures, several disputes have ended with lawsuits. In one prominent example, the State of Washington sued DOE in 2008 for failing to meet some forty deadlines it had agreed to under the TPA.14 The parties eventually settled and agreed to extend many of the deadlines in a consent decree entered with the court.15 The Hanford Cleanup Program DOE has split the Hanford cleanup project into two operationally separate areas: the Richlands Operations Office area, which comprises the original Hanford facilities; and the River Corridor Site, an eighty-square-mile area contaminated by discharged reactor-­ cooling water. The most recent estimates from the DOE for the total estimated life-cycle cleanup costs for Hanford are between $113 billion and $134 billion, or ap­ proxi­ mately one-third of the Office of Environmental Management’s (EM) cleanup cost estimates for all the sites for which it is responsible.16 Different components of the project deal with reprocessing wastes, most of which are stored in liquid form in tanks; SNF; collection, management, and disposal of solid wastes; and remediation of soils and groundwater. The overall goal for Hanford is to shrink its contamination area from 581 square miles to 75 square miles by 2015. Other goals include completing the pretreatment and vitrification of 10 percent of tank waste by mass by 2018 and vitrification of all HLW by 2028.17 DOE estimates that cleanup at Hanford will finally be completed between 2050 and 2062.18 For the moment, cleanup is on schedule,19 but DOE has admitted that 44 of 146 major enforceable milestones are at risk of not being completed on time.20 Table C.1, from the December 2009 version of the Action Plan in the TPA, provides an overview of major milestones for the cleanup. One of the major challenges faced by DOE at...

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