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From Production to Cleanup: The Tri-Party Agreement

Two men and one woman sign documents at a table while three men stand behind.
The Tri-Party Agreement signing, 1989.

Courtesy, Tri-Party Agreement Agencies

As with many important events in history, the signing of the Tri-Party Agreement was influenced more by the personalities of the individual signatories involved than by the policy decisions of the entities they represented.

The Hanford site was the nation’s primary center of plutonium production during World War II and the Cold War. Production ended in 1988 in a time of growing opposition to nuclear energy and high levels of distrust about the management of the site over the past forty-five years. On April 26, 1986, a graphite moderated reactor like Hanford’s dual-purpose N Reactor, exploded at Chernobyl in Ukraine, releasing radiation across much of Europe.

Unable to travel to Ukraine, the national press flocked to Hanford with questions about the safety of Hanford’s nuclear reactors. Anti-nuclear sentiment increased across the country and the Pacific Northwest. In November of that year, Washington voters approved a Referendum that authorized the state’s governor to veto any attempt to store outside nuclear waste at Hanford.

Two years earlier, Mike Lawrence, then thirty-six, became the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Manager of Hanford Operations. He was one of the agency’s rising stars, the youngest site manager in its history. Son of a Washington, D.C. police officer, Lawrence graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in physics before joining the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) production division. Lawrence then moved on to developing environmental impact statements, working on nuclear non-proliferation issues during the Carter Administration, and as a team member searching for a site for the national underground nuclear waste repository.

When DOE declined to address the growing questions about their activities at Hanford, Lawrence, on his own authority―but with the knowledge of DOE headquarters―began a community education campaign. He held community meetings and released previously classified material that detailed the history of Hanford operations, including repeated leaks and emissions going back to the start of the Manhattan Project.

The community struggled to find new missions for Hanford. Ultimately, with the end of plutonium production at the site, it became clear that Hanford’s primary focus was going to shift from the production to the cleanup of the nuclear wastes that were created over the past forty years.

Most of the radioactivity in those wastes was in approximately 56 million gallons (211,983,060 liters) of high-level liquid waste—the results of the chemical separation processes that produced plutonium—stored in 177 aging underground tanks in the middle of the Hanford Site. Low activity solid waste, items like shoe covers and gloves, were stored in drums and buried in trenches. Highly contaminated equipment had also been disposed in the trenches. Hundreds of buildings were also contaminated, and large amounts of plutonium was stored on site. Finally, DOE later estimated that as many as 444 billion gallons (1,680,722,832,096 liters) of groundwater was contaminated by liquids intentionally discharged into ponds and cribs, or leaked from ditches, pipelines, and the underground tanks. The liquid effluent raised the water table as much as 80 feet (24.38 meters), and the groundwater contamination was slowly moving toward the Columbia River.

Lawrence understood that the existing federal environmental regulations, along with the state’s Hazardous Waste Management Act, gave the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state’s Department of Ecology the necessary jurisdiction to regulate Hanford. He also knew that the Hanford Site was grossly out of compliance. “The only way around that was to find an agreement.”

Preliminary low-level negotiations between the State of Washington, DOE’s Richland Operations Office, and EPA’s Seattle office began in late 1987 in Seattle. They were unsuccessful, and the negotiations stalled.

Booth Gardner was elected Washington’s governor in November 1984. He appointed Christine Gregoire to be the director of the Washington Department of Ecology. Gregoire attended the University of Washington where she received a BA degree in sociology. She went on to earn a law degree from Gonzaga University and to serve as an assistant attorney general for Slade Gorton before he was elected to the US Senate. Interviewed in 2004, Gregoire remembered,

My legal training combined with my position as director of Ecology led me to realize we had a legal position that was, in my estimation, undeniable to the DOE, but I didn’t want to be overly aggressive by threatening a lawsuit. My clear preference was, let’s see if folks won’t be willing to sit down and negotiate, and see if we can’t move forward with characterization and cleanup.

She contacted Mike Lawrence about restarting the negotiations. It soon became clear that both wanted an agreement.

Formal negotiations began in January 1988. The very detailed and complicated work took a total of thirteen months. It was clear that future cleanup would take large amounts of money over and above the current $190 million Hanford budget. The local community and Washington’s congressional delegation would have to be engaged to support higher funding levels. There were other stakeholders, ranging from Hanford workers to environmentalists, who wanted to have a seat at the table.

As agreement neared, Gregoire believed that any agreement should be at least blessed, if not mandated, by a federal judge. Lawrence disagreed.

The federal Department of Justice doesn’t settle anything. (Opponents) will contest it. It will go on for a year or more, lots of money will be spent, but nothing will get done. Eventually, you’re going to win. You know you’re right. I know you’re right. Justice probably knows you’re right, but (the opponent’s lawyers are) getting paid to fight. Let’s wait until it doesn’t work and then take it to court.

Ultimately, Gardner resolved the issue. The perception of how his administration addressed the issue was important to the new governor. If the people of Washington thought he was not adequately protecting their interests, it would be his political capital that was at risk―a reality that both he and Gregoire understood.

On December 16, 1988, Gardner met with Gregoire and Lawrence in his office at the state capitol in Olympia. Both presented their opposing arguments on placing the agreement before a judge. After listening to Lawrence’s argument, Gardner turned to Gregoire and said, “Can you live with this?” “I can if you can, Governor,” she replied. She knew that it was his political career that was on the line.

Lawrence agreed to ask for an increase Hanford’s budget request to cover the cost of a waste treatment plant that the state was demanding. Lawrence and his team came up with an estimate of $1.5 billion for the cleanup—$500 million a year for three years. Bob Rosselli, Lawrence’s deputy manager for administration, remembered, “It was a complete pipe dream. If the real cost had been known, the department probably wouldn’t have let us sign it, but we had a lot more autonomy in those days.”

The Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order, the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA), was signed on May 15, 1989, at a formal signing ceremony, complete with cake and champagne, held at the Grand Ballroom of the Richland Red Lion in front of approximately 300 people, including Governor Booth Gardner. Learn more about Tri-Party from the Washington Department of Ecology and the US Department of Energy.

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Last updated: December 15, 2023