A plan to speed up environmental cleanup of Hanford's 300 Area first must settle the question of what the area should look like when work is done, Hanford Advisory Board members agreed Tuesday.

The board's waste management committee discussed the question Tuesday in the latest public meeting on what should be addressed in a plan to clean up Hanford's Columbia River shoreline by 2012.

Preliminary estimates are it will cost $784 million to clean up the 300 Area.

The board will continue the discussion today beginning at 8 a.m. at the Consolidated Information Center at Washington State University at Tri-Cities in Richland.

The Department of Energy wants to accelerate cleanup work along the river -- mostly at the nine old plutonium reactors and the 300 Area -- to show tangible progress at the site by 2012. DOE has to have the first year of this accelerated cleanup outlined and budgeted by February.

Tuesday's discussion focused on the 300 Area's roughly 150 buildings, approximately 40 locations of contaminated soils and one waste burial site, as well as another 10 radioactive and hazardous waste burial sites within a half-mile of the 300 Area.

A major concern was that much is still unknown about subterranean contaminants in the area.

"The bottom line is we don't have enough (samplings and analyses) of these burial grounds to know which one is worse than the other," said Mike Goldstein, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's remedial project manager for the 300 Area.

Board members said the question is complicated by Hanford's Cold War security measures, skimpy documentation and problems with keeping records updated.