Energy Department Must Commit to River Cleanup, Hanford, Wash., Officials Say.(Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News)

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, September, 2000 by Stang, John

Sep. 13--Hanford must stop sacrificing one project to pay for another if it expects to gain support for plans to accelerate cleanup along the Columbia River shoreline.

Two Hanford Advisory Board committees, the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency delivered that message to Department of Energy officials Tuesday in Richland.

DOE is thinking about increasing emphasis on cleaning up the river shore to finish the bulk of that job by 2012.

That would reduce drastically the amount of land contaminated by five decades of producing nuclear weapons materials at Hanford. And it would show tangible progress to Congress and the public, which are skeptical about the effectiveness of pouring billions of dollars into cleanup.

That...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.