The Trump administration has proposed a $34 million cut for the Hanford nuclear site for the next fiscal year compared to spending last fiscal year.
The proposal, forwarded to Congress which sets the budget, would provide about $2.94 billion for environmental cleanup work at the nuclear site in Eastern Washington.
Hanford is the largest and most contaminated of the Department of Energy nuclear defense cleanup sites, and fared better than many of the other sites. The total cut proposed for those programs was about $400 million to a budget of $7.2 billion, using last year’s budget as a baseline.
With a need for spending at Hanford to increase to meet legal deadlines, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the vice chairperson of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, called the proposed Hanford budget “utterly unacceptable and will be going nowhere as far as I am concerned.”
“Trump’s proposal for Hanford would force us to fall behind on the cleanup mission at a critical time, leaving key milestones unmet and raising the cost on the cleanup in the long run — not to mention increasing the safety and environmental risks for the Tri-Cities,” she said in a statement.
The Washington state Department of Ecology, a Hanford regulator, estimated in 2024 that a budget of almost $4.7 billion would be needed in fiscal 2026 to meet legal deadlines for environmental cleanup of the site.
Proposed Hanford site budget
Friday evening in Washington, D.C., the administration released more details of its proposed fiscal 2026 budget, with comparisons given to last year’s budget since the Trump administration has yet to release details of the current fiscal year budget.
The new budget details provided proposed Hanford cleanup budget levels in three areas, shifting more money to managing and treating radioactive waste held in underground tanks:
▪ Money for the Hanford nuclear site’s vitrification plant would be increased from $952 million in fiscal 2024 to $990 million in fiscal 2026. This summer the plant is expected to start treating some decades-old tank waste for disposal.
▪ Funding for the management of the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste held in underground tanks until it can be treated at the vit plant or through other methods also would be increased. The budget of $999 million last fiscal year is proposed to increase to $1.11 billion.
It would bring total funding proposed for managing and treating tank waste to more than $1.9 billion.
▪ That would leave $837 million for the remainder of environmental cleanup at Hanford, a drop from a little more than $1 billion budgeted for fiscal 2024.
The work includes cleaning up contaminated soil and water; digging up buried radioactive waste; and tearing down contaminated and obsolete buildings, including chemical processing plants that are longer than the Seattle Space Needle is tall.
That section of the budget also covers sitewide services, such as roads and utilities for the 580-square-mile site in Eastern Washington.
The 580-square-mile Hanford nuclear site was left heavily contaminated from production of nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program from World War II through the Cold War.
Hanford budget needs
DOE has been planning for cleanup work at Hanford in the near term that is expected to cost more than $3 billion annually.
That includes starting to glassify some of the least radioactive tank waste at the vitrification plant this summer.
In addition, construction needs to be ramped up to finish the vitrification plant facility that will turn some of the most radioactive waste into a stable glass form starting by a 2033 deadline set by the federal court.
Other projects that will require funding include preparing to package and ship transuranic waste to the national Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Hanford’s transuranic waste is typically debris contaminated with plutonium.
And DOE and Ecology have agreed to retrieve the least radioactive waste from 22 tanks that are some of the farthest from the vitrification plant for grouting and shipping for disposal outside of Washington.
Long term, significantly higher budgets would be needed for Hanford to finish cleanup as projected in its latest lifecycle cost and schedule report released this spring.
The report said remaining cleanup work costs could range from $364 billion to $640 billion, with the higher number completing most cleanup as of 2086.
At the low range, it projected spending peaking at $8 billion per year with spending approaching $4.5 billion to up to $5 billion annually for most of the remainder of this decade into the 2040s.
Under the high range estimate, spending would peak at $13 billion in 2075 with $6 billion to $8 billion needed annually for most of the remainder of the decade to 2050, when spending would need to increase.
A previous fiscal 2026 budget document released by the Trump administration earlier this month — called the skinny budget due to its more limited information — called for funding at Hanford to remain steady at fiscal 2025 levels.
“Writing spending bills will be challenging, but I’ll be fighting to support Hanford, the workers powering the cleanup mission and the Tri-Cities community,” Murray said in a statement.
© 2025 Tri-City Herald (Kennewick, Wash.). Visit www.tri-cityherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
