Aug. 13 Daily News editorial

Washington state and federal officials Tuesday announced a new agreement on the cleanup of Hanford nuclear reservation. It pushes the completion date back almost two decades, from 2028 to 2047. This new cleanup schedule is disappointing, though hardly surprising given the government’s long history of delay and disappointment at Hanford.

The good news, however, is that the federal government can no longer miss deadlines with relative impunity. The U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to make the newly agreed-upon deadlines enforceable in court.

This is very good news. For the first time since the signing of the Tri-Party Agreement in 1989, there is the sense that everyone is on the same page with regard to accomplishing this difficult cleanup. Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire sees cause for cautious optimism, according to Associated Press writer Shannon Dininny’s report of Tuesday’s press conference in Richland, Wash., announcing the agreement. Gregoire said the new schedule is longer than state officials hoped, but “it is aggressive, it is achievable, and it is enforceable.”

The state has been trying for more than two years to reach this sort of an agreement with the Energy Department. While the federal government would agree to deadlines that were acceptable to the state, until now it had refused to agree on making those deadlines enforceable in court. That refusal prompted Gregoire to bring suit against the government last year. The lawsuit likely played a part in moving the Energy Department to agree court-enforceable deadlines.

This accountability has become critical. Without it, there can be little confidence that the government will adhere to this or any schedule. The Energy Department has failed to meet numerous deadlines established in the Tri-Party Agreement. The state has agreed to more than 400 changes in that agreement over the years. Even so, the federal government announced in December 2008 that it would miss almost two dozen more deadlines this year.

The time for stricter accountability has come. Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the nation. The 586-square-mile reservation in central Washington contains roughly two-thirds of the country’s high-level nuclear waste. Fifty-three million gallons of that waste is contained 142 single-shell underground storage tanks that are 30 years beyond their design lifespan.

At least 67 of those tanks are leaking. They’ve leaked an estimated 1 million gallons of radioactive waste, some of which has made its way into the groundwater and is slowing moving toward the nearby Columbia River. With more than 1 million Washingtonians and Oregonians living down river from Hanford in this and 42 other communities, the clock is ticking on this cleanup effort.

The new schedule announced Tuesday pushes the completion date further into the future than we’d have liked. But, as Gregoire suggested, it’s reasonable given the technological challenges this project entails. And, most important, there now is reason to think the federal government will do all it can to adhere to the schedule’s deadlines.