Pick your argument.

It's too risky to depend on just one company to deal with Hanford's deadliest mess.

Or it's silly and expensive for taxpayers to pay two companies to build identical plants side by side for treating Hanford's wastes.

Next year, the Department of Energy will have to choose one of these two philosophical approaches to turning Hanford's radioactive wastes into glass through a process called vitrification.

In May, DOE is to tell Lockheed Martin Advanced Environmental Systems and British Nuclear Fuels whether both, one or none will tackle the first phase of Hanford's privatized waste program.

The colossal price tag for that first stage has sparked arguments over whether DOE should abandon its proposed two-team approach.

Right now, DOE believes the initial phase will cost $4 billion and convert 6 percent of the tank wastes into glass logs through 2007. Various scenarios using preliminary Lockheed and BNFL estimates put that price at $5.2 billion to $6.6 billion.

But the corporate figures are soft and could be trimmed by January, when the two teams formally submit their proposals. Right now, DOE, BNFL and Lockheed officials don't know how much trimming is possible.

BNFL has been one of the leading opponents to the two-plant proposal.

Congress is reluctant to spend the big bucks needed to support two teams, BNFL's team president Maurice Bullock argues.

Trimming the project to one team would make the allocations palatable to Congress and Wall Street, he said.

Although DOE will pick only one team to build a high-level waste glassification plant, it plans to have BNFL and Lockheed each build a low-level waste plant.

"You've got to look at reality. No one suggested two vitrification facilities, two pretreatment facilities, two of everything under the old regime (before the privatization plan). Why build two just because it's a different form of contract?" Bullock asked.

Todd Martin, staff researcher for the Hanford Edu cation Action League, would love to have two teams in place, but also believes political and financial realities dictate otherwise.

A budget-cutting Congress won't allocate enough money for two teams, so DOE should plan to go with only one, Martin said.

Lockheed is leading the opposite point of view.

Jack Dickey, Lockheed team president, argues two teams are needed to keep down the costs in the first phase.

If only one team is picked, that sole contractor "could hold DOE hostage" with whatever revised price estimates and construction timetables it wants to produce, Dickey said.

Roy Gephart, a Battelle-Northwest program manager who studies tank waste issues, agrees more than one team and more than one approach is needed.

"What if I put all my retirement benefits in one high-risk stock in a make-or-break approach to a long-term investment? That doesn't make sense. We have to be careful about going with one approach. That's a recipe for high risk in an uncertain world," Gephart said.

A big factor in the final decision will be whether only one team can meet the timetables set by the Tri-Party Agreement, the master plan for cleaning up Hanford.

Right now, the two-team approach meshes with the Tri-Party Agreement schedules for treating tank wastes.

Neither DOE nor the Washington Department of Ecology knows if a one-team proposal could keep to the cleanup timetable. And they won't know until they study BNFL's and Lockheed's packages early next year.

However, Bill Taylor, head of Hanford's privatized glassification program for DOE, has his doubts. "I don't think you can award just one (team) and meet the Tri-Party Agreement milestones."

But Taylor also acknowledged Congress could trim the funds enough that DOE might have to go with one plant and explore ways to increase the capacity.

Next spring, DOE could conceivably rule that neither BNFL nor Lockheed has a good enough proposal to get a green light.

That would strike a major blow to the cleanup timetables that Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency enforce.

"'None' is not an option," said Mike Wilson, Ecology's nuclear waste program manager.