Hanford's Office of River Protection is expected to soon grow from 90 employees to 150 as it expands and regroups.

The Department of Energy's Washington, D.C., headquarters has approved expanding and reorganizing the Hanford office, DOE announced Thursday.

The Office of River Protection is in charge of maintaining Hanford's 177 radioactive waste tanks and of eventually converting the 53 million gallons of radioactive wastes in the tanks into glass.

No timeline has been set for how fast the Office of River Protection will add employees, said DOE spokesman Erik Olds. Much of the reorganization is still being planned.

While DOE's headquarters has approved the expansion, it has yet to identify where the money will come from and how much will be needed to pay for the extra 60 employees.

These extra hirings come at a time when DOE also expects to soon ask for an extra few hundred million dollars a year in Hanford cleanup money from Congress.

The extra employees will fill some current job vacancies at the Office of River Protection. And they will help handle an increased workload as Hanford's waste glassification project cranks up, Olds said.

Also, the Office of River Protection will be reorganized into a more traditional DOE site office -- with more subdepartments, more top managers and more employees.

Until last summer, the agency had expected a corporate team led by BNFL Inc. to build and operate the glassification plants under a proposed contract based on huge private investments up-front with little federal expense for several years.

That concept fell apart last summer when the cost estimates skyrocketed and BNFL was fired. DOE is now going with a more traditional approach to hire a new glassification contractor in January -- an arrangement that requires additional DOE employees to manage the work.