Press Releases
March 23, 2021 — $500,000 gift supports first WSU Tri-Cities endowed faculty position in energy sector
RICHLAND, Wash. — Retired physicist Bob Ferguson, who served as the first deputy assistant secretary of nuclear programs for the U.S. Department of Energy, made a $500,000 gift to support Washington State University Tri-Cities’ first endowed faculty position in energy and environment.
The position represents the initial step in the development of a future institute at WSU Tri-Cities. The institute will be dedicated to understanding and shaping the region’s diverse energy resources, and will directly leverage WSU’s research strengths in water resources, environment, agriculture, policy and economics.
Tri-City Business Leaders Launch a Nonprofit Corporation to Accelerate Cleanup of the Hanford Site and Change its Mission to Clean Energy Research & Development
A new nonprofit advocacy group called Northwest Energy Associates (NEA) has been launched by Tri-Cities business leaders Bob Ferguson, Bill Lampson, and Gary Petersen for the purpose of accelerating the cleanup of the Hanford Site. The nonprofit company is represented by Tri-Cities attorney Coke Roth.
Ferguson and Lampson will co-chair the organization. Ferguson served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Programs for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and CEO of the Washington Public Power Supply System. He also was the first president of the Tri-Cities Economic Development Council (TRIDEC).
Lampson, CEO of Lampson International Crane Service, is the current chair of TRIDEC’s Federal Programs committee. The Lampson family is widely known for its philanthropy and local community support.
Petersen will take the helm as volunteer president. He has a long history of dealing with challenges facing this new organization, having served as vice-president of TRIDEC Federal Programs for 14 years.
Ferguson, Lampson, and Petersen have a history of proactivity in driving the cleanup at Hanford, even in the face of stiff political obstacles. As private citizens, they sued President Obama and his administration for illegally shutting down the Yucca Mountain Project, which was the destination for Hanford’s high-level nuclear waste disposal. They won that case in 2013 with a landmark mandamus decision that required the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to complete its review of DOE’s Yucca Mountain repository license application. In 2014, the NRC concluded that Yucca Mountain met the criteria as a safe and suitable repository site; however, politics has blocked any progress to date.
Continuing the current plan to vitrify the tank waste, the Hanford Site will become an unpaid de facto long-term repository for a variety of nuclear waste types, in particular the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in Hanford’s 177 underground tanks. The NEA advocates faster, less costly alternative treatment methods and offsite disposal that will accelerate the cleanup of waste in Hanford tank farms.
Other NEA board members include Tri-Cities businesswomen Kathy Balcom, a Tri-City advertising executive, and Kate Lampson, Communications Director at Lampson International. The all-volunteer board will be expanded to represent other interests impacted by the long delay in Hanford cleanup and the need for a new mission for Hanford stability. Science writer Sallie Ortiz serves as website/newsletter editor and administrator.
The NEA will focus on two initiatives. The first, Clean Up Hanford Now, will vigorously support the demonstration of tank waste treatment and immobilization methods recommended in recent reports by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and the National Academy of Sciences that are safer, faster, and one-fifth the cost of vitrification. The DOE is not actively supporting this initiative and the Washington State Department of Ecology has threatened to use its regulatory authority to block DOE’s effort to permit necessary site activities.
The second initiative, Clean Energy Advocates, is dedicated to transitioning the Hanford Site’s historic Manhattan Project mission to a new clean energy mission. A Clean Energy Research & Development Park on the Hanford Site will bring new jobs and more educational opportunities to the region.
The long-time business leaders were compelled to form this nonprofit advocacy organization out of frustration from watching decades of delay and skyrocketing taxpayer liability for cleaning up Hanford’s underground storage tanks. The Tri-Party Agreement was signed more than 30 years ago to direct and accelerate cleanup of the Hanford Site. Although cleanup work on parts of the Site have shown progress, the tank farm cleanup under the vitrification plan has languished.
The original contract cost estimate for the Bechtel Waste Treatment Plant project was nearly $4 billion and both construction and operation were scheduled to be completed by July 2011. By 2019, not a single gallon of waste from the tanks has been vitrified, and the cost to date plus the newest DOE cost estimate to complete just one of the originally planned facilities—the low-activity waste facility—is $17 billion and rising. The pretreatment and high-level waste facilities, which were included in the original estimate, are on indefinite hold and likely will never be completed or needed.
The estimated lifecycle cost for all of Hanford cleanup increased rom $106 billion in 2016 to a range of $323 billion to $677 billion in 2019, and the timeline for completing vitrification and cleanup has been pushed into the next century.
For the past six years, budget allocations for Hanford cleanup have been $5.89 billion short of the amount needed to comply with the annual work plans. That has been nearly $1 billion short each year. Anything less than a “compliant budget” continues to add both time and cost to complete emptying and processing waste from the 177 Hanford tanks.
Citizens in eastern Washington and beyond have begun to recognize that continued funding of Hanford cleanup at continually increasing levels is not sustainable.
“Cleanup of Hanford tanks by vitrification already is many years behind schedule. Yet the DOE has not even filed an application for the state permit needed to implement the demonstration of a well-proven, faster, and cheaper method to clean up the tank waste,” said Petersen.
Lampson and Ferguson want people to remember that Hanford’s single-shell tanks are 75 years old and the newer double-shell tanks are nearly 50. These tanks were built to store the waste generated during production of nuclear weapons to support U.S. efforts to end WWII and the Cold War.
Ferguson knows first-hand that these tanks are well beyond their design lives. He was in charge of building the double-shell tanks in the 1970s to transfer the waste from leaking single-shell tanks. He said, “It is long past time for DOE to cut through the bureaucracy and over-regulation that has stopped the cleanup progress of this historic waste. If DOE adopted some of the Manhattan Project management principles that built the world’s first production reactor in just 11 months, it could remove, treat, ship, and dispose of the legacy tank waste offsite within 15 to 2o years.”
Lampson added, “We owe it to our community and U.S. taxpayers to get this site cleaned up and use the money saved to transition Hanford’s wartime mission to the new war on global climate change.”
The NEA will hold agencies, contractors, and individuals publicly accountable by keeping the region and the nation apprised of both progress and delays, budgets, and permit activity regarding cleanup of Hanford tank farms in a Clean Up Hanford Now newsletter. Other up-to-date factual information will be posted on the organization’s website to keep the public informed.
Like-minded individuals are invited to join this effort to support faster, safer, and less costly ways to process and dispose of tank waste. The continued delay and ever-increasing costs of the current vitrification strategy for Hanford Site tank farm cleanup is no longer acceptable or affordable.
Northwest Energy Associates welcomes participation, questions, comments, and suggestions on its Clean Up Hanford Now website.