Someday in the early 21st century, the first bill will arrive.

It'll be a whopper.

Maybe $1 billion. Maybe $1.5 billion.

And that's just the annual bill. A similar yearly bill will come due for several years running.

That's how much Congress would be legally obligated to pay for the glass produced at Hanford's proposed privatized glassification plants if the current plan works.

Here's some perspective.

When the glassification payments kick in, each yearly installment will be at least equal and probably exceed Hanford's annual cleanup budget for everything else.

And right now, Hanford's government and corporate officials are sweating whether Congress is willing to commit the big bucks over 10 years.

The initial signs indicate Congress isn't eager to pick up the tab. Lawmakers have slashed proposals to stockpile the cash early on to provide a cushion for the massive extra appropriations expected in a few years.

The Department of Energy predicts the privatized glassification ventures will cost $4 billion by 2007. DOE has 11 years - fiscal 1997 through fiscal 2007 - to raise the money.

Setting aside $350 million to $400 million a year would do it, but so far Congress has reluctantly stashed away about half that amount.

Looming in the background is a basic fact of life: The private contractors will assume huge risks but they expect huge payoffs at the end.

"For any company putting its money on the table for 10 years, we're talking big money" at payment time, said Jack Dickey, manager of the 11-company vitrification team led by Lockheed Martin Advanced Environmental Services.

Lockheed and BNFL are keeping mum on potential profit margins, citing competition with each other.

But Dickey said his team's margin would be much greater than the possibly 5 to 10 percent margins earned by a more traditional DOE management contract.

Under the plan for privatizing glassification plants for Hanford's radioactive wastes, DOE won't pay a cent to Lockheed or the four-company team led by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) for the five to six years that they design and build the first phase.

The plants are to be operating by 2002. That means payments for glassified wastes likely would start in 2003 and continue through 2007, when that initial phase ends.

If Lockheed builds both high-level and low-level waste plants, Dickey speculates his team could spend almost $2 billion by 2002 and about $2.5 billion by 2003 before it would see the first dollar back from DOE.

BNFL faces a similar potential debt.

Lockheed and BNFL plan to borrow most of the money they spend. BNFL's team might shell out 30 percent of its own money, said BNFL team President Maurice Bullock. The Lockheed team is keeping its calculations closer to its vest.

That means Wall Street's investment banks will provide most of the money. Investment loans mean interest payments. And BNFL and Lockheed say each could possibly end up paying $1 million a day in interest after the plants are built.

So beginning in 2003, Lockheed and BNFL will want to begin recovering their big initial investments and pay off their huge interest obligations. Since their financial holes will be very deep, Dickey speculated it could take until 2006 or 2007 before a team shows a profit.

But exactly how much the loans will cost depends on how the contractors and the federal government divide the risks.

The less money the federal government puts aside to guarantee payments down the road, the higher interest skittish Wall Street bankers will charge the contractors, Bullock and Dickey said. And that translates to higher federal payments to the contractors in the long run, they said.

"When talking to the banks, there's a large degree of skepticism that DOE will follow through. But if the contract terms are right, (the banks) will go with it," Bullock said.

The money Congress is requested to set aside each year for the glassification program is supposed to guarantee that enough money will be on hand to pay for the glass logs.

If the feds decide to scrap the whole project in midstream, the money would reimburse BNFL, Lockheed and their investors.

So far, Congress allocated $170 million for the set-aside funds in fiscal 1997. Northwest congressional members managed to negotiate $115 million for the fund in fiscal 1998. That's after the House National Security Committee wanted to allocate nothing, proposing more studies before revisiting the issue for fiscal 1999.

That's a total of $285 million so far, with nine more years left to set aside the remaining roughly $3.7 billion.

"The set-aside is a direct indication of the federal government's will to see this through. If the set-aside is inadequate, I'm concerned how the financial community would view it," said Mike Wilson, the Washington Department of Ecology's nuclear program manager.

Congress's reluctance to set aside bigger amounts of money can be traced to a general distrust of DOE's ability to supervise privatization, said U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.

Hastings and a recent House National Security Committee report cited Lockheed's troubled privatization venture to clean up a plutonium-loaded acre at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. Problems there bumped that venture's price tag from $179 million to $337 million. Dickey said the Idaho problems were partly because DOE did not have any of its own regulatory people keeping an eye on that privatization venture and partly because of inadequate analysis of that acre's wastes. Measures are being taken to ensure this won't happen at Hanford, Dickey said.

DOE is setting up a special office in Richland to handle the regulatory chores of overseeing the glassification program.

If the set-aside allocations continue to fall short for the next several years, DOE, Ecology and corporate officials all say huge requests for glassification money later on will be inevitable.

"If we have a (request) of $500 million to $600 million (in a single year next decade), Congress is going to say: 'You're nuts,' " said Bill Taylor, head of DOE's Hanford tank-waste privatization program.

Several officials note the first payments will be due in 2003, one year after Congress says it wants to balance the national budget in 2002.