The Department of Energy has fallen behind schedule or spent more than expected so far on about a third of its environmental cleanup projects being paid for with federal economic stimulus money.

However, Hanford is doing better, with 12 of 15 projects meeting both their cost and also schedule goals to date.

But overall the statistics look much better for Hanford.

The majority of the Hanford Recovery Act money is being spent on DOE Hanford Richland Operations Office projects, which include work other than at the tank farms or vitrification plant.

For the combined work, "we are right on schedule and are 12 percent under cost," said Jon Peschong, the Recovery Act program manager for the Richland Operations Office.

DOE work on Recovery Act projects was reviewed by the Government Accountability Office at the request of several congressional leaders, with results released Thursday.

DOE environmental cleanup projects received $6 billion to spend over 21/2 years, with most work to be completed in late 2011. Hanford received nearly a third of that money, $1.96 billion.

That included $1.6 billion for 10 projects under the Richland Operations Office. Eight of those are meeting cost and schedule targets, including one that had been behind schedule when the GAO compiled data through March. It since has caught up.

But work to process temporarily buried transuranic waste -- typically waste contaminated with plutonium -- has fallen behind schedule after work stopped for several months to develop safer ways of determining what was in the ground before digging started.

"We will sacrifice the schedule to be safe," Peschong said. He expects the work to be finished on schedule.

In addition, work at one of Hanford's most hazardous burial grounds, 618-10, is over the forecast cost for the work completed so far to determine what radioactive and hazardous chemical materials may be buried there.

Across the nation, DOE picked mostly low-risk projects that workers had shown in the past they could do well when it allocated Recovery Act dollars.

However, the 618-10 Burial Ground is unlike any work done so far at Hanford. It includes a mix of laboratory waste that was trucked away from the river to be buried from 1954-63 six miles north of Richland near the Hanford highway. It includes 94 vertical pipe units made from 55-gallon drums welded end-to-end into pipes and buried vertically in the soil so waste could be dropped down them. It's expected to include high-activity radioactive waste.

Five projects at the Hanford DOE Office of River Protection tank farms, where radioactive waste is buried in underground tanks, received money. Four are meeting cost and schedule goals for work done so far to improve infrastructure there.

The fifth project, upgrading some waste transfer lines, has not met either goal because of a new safety analysis of all the tank farms completed at the beginning of the year. The design for the waste transfer lines completed earlier was compared to the new safety analysis, and officials con- cluded some design work needed to be redone.

DOE still plans to finish the project on time, officials. said

Across the DOE complex, slightly less than one-third of Recovery Act money has been spent, the GAO concluded. At Hanford, $708 million, or more than a third of its economic stimulus money, has been spent.