It appears Hanford's fiscal 2000 budget will be bigger than the 1999 budget, but also smaller than what the Department of Energy requested.

Details still are uncertain, as is how much the 2000 budget will fall short of meeting Hanford's legal cleanup obligations.

Hanford is now 212 months into fiscal 2000, which began Oct. 1, but the government still is juggling budget numbers.

Bob Tibbatts, DOE's acting financial services director, briefed the Hanford Advisory Board's financial affairs committee Monday on the budget.

Tentatively, only the tank farms and environmental restoration programs appear to have dodged cuts from the original budget requests.

What is keeping DOE's 2000 budget from being nailed down is a handful of last-minute congressional appropriations for a hodgepodge of non-DOE programs that did not have money allocated to them.

To compensate, Congress has called for all federal agencies to shift some money to these programs, amounting to 0.38 percent of their total discretionary 2000 budgets.

Individual agencies might have to transfer between zero and 15 percent of their 2000 budgets for those extra appropriations, which include community centers, parks and water supply developments.

DOE has $5.9 billion allocated to environmental cleanup in 2000, but it does not know how much it will have to transfer for the extra appropriations.

Hanford expects to get 18 percent of DOE's nationwide cleanup budget.

Here is how the budget crunching is unfolding:

- In fiscal 1999, Hanford's budget consisted of $995 million controlled by its Office of River Protection and Hanford operations offices, and $109 million controlled by Washington, D.C. That totaled $1.104 billion.

- For 2000, DOE requested $1.065 billion to be controlled by its two Richland offices and calculated the Washington, D.C., office would allocate close to $109 million for Hanford. That tentatively totaled $1.174 billion to be shared by DOE's Hanford office and the Office of River Protection, which manages the radioactive waste tanks operations.

- Congress cut DOE's national cleanup budget request slightly, and then added the 0.38 percent transfer.

- DOE Richland officials currently expect to lose slightly less than 1 percent of their cleanup budgets to this shift.

- This leads to a preliminary Richland-controlled 2000 cleanup budget of $1.053 billion plus about $109 million in Washington, D.C.-controlled money. The preliminary scenario of roughly $1.162 billion for 2000 would be $58 million more than 1999's budget, but $12 million less than DOE's original 2000 request.

- A big question mark is how much the 2000 Hanford budget will fall short of meeting its legal cleanup obligations under the Tri-Party Agreement and other laws and regulations. In spring, the $1.065 billion request was calculated to fall almost $98 million short of what is needed. DOE has trimmed that shortfall since, Tibbatts said, but the shortfall amount will be difficult to calculate until the final budget is set. This shortfall is expected to get worse. If DOE keeps its Hanford cleanup budgets roughly level from year to year, these shortfalls are expected to be at least $200 million annually starting in 2001.

- The Office of River Protection's preliminary 2000 budget appears to be $337 million, or $2 million more than requested. Right now, the rest of DOE's Hanford operations appear on track to get $716 million. That would be $14 million less than requested.

- The spent nuclear fuel program is looking at getting $190 million. The facilities stabilization program appears to be getting $190 million, while the waste management program is looking at $112 million. All are slightly less than what DOE originally requested. Facilities stabilization mostly covers cleaning out the Plutonium Finishing Plant and the highly contaminated Buildings 324 and 327. Waste management covers dealing with Hanford's thousands of barrels of low-level, mixed low-level and transuranic wastes - plus the site's analytical labs.

- The environmental restoration program tentatively appears on track to get $140 million, compared with the original $135 million request. But figures from last summer showed $157 million would be needed to keep all of the environmental restoration projects on schedule. This program includes removing contaminated soil from the river area, decontaminating and sealing old reactors, and dealing with seeping subterranean contaminants.

- Fluor Daniels' indirect costs - overhead and shared equipment and facilities - are supposed to shrink from $243 million in 1999 to $233 million in 2000, according to DOE's goals. But Fluor is aiming to drop that figure to $224 million.