The Department of Energy plans to spend $1.776 billion on cleaning up Hanford in fiscal 2002.

That's:

-- $42 million less than the $1.818 billion that Congress earmarked for Hanford in fiscal 2002.

-- $320 million more than the $1.456 billion spent on Hanford in fiscal 2001.

-- $376 million more than than the $1.4 billion that the Bush administration originally wanted to spend at Hanford for fiscal 2002, which began last Oct. 1.

But what do those numbers really mean?

Hanford won't know until the middle of next week.

DOE's cleanup czar Jesse Roberson ordered all DOE cleanup operations -- including Hanford's Richland office and its Office of River Protection -- to provide her by Wednesday with a detailed breakdown on how their budgets will affect their work obligations.

This begins DOE's annual tweaking of what Congress appropriates for nationwide nuclear cleanup each year.

This year, DOE wanted Congress to appropriate $5.913 billion for nationwide nuclear cleanup in fiscal 2002. Instead, Congress bumped that request by $803 million to $6.716 billion.

DOE's calculations stated that Hanford needs $1.832 billion in 2002 to meet its legal cleanup obligation. Congress ended up telling DOE to give Hanford $1.818 billion -- $1.07 billion to the Office of River Protection and $748 million to Hanford's Richland office.

Then some national level factors came into play.

All federal agencies were required to trim their budgets slightly as part of an overall budget balancing measure. That trickled down to an $8 million reduction in the Office of River Protection's budget and an $18 million reduction in the Richland office's budget, DOE officials said.

Then DOE's headquarters in Washington, D.C., "taxed" its field operations for some money for headquarters' programs. That cut another $16 million from the Richland office's budget, but nothing from the Office of River protection.

The Office of River Protection has to figure out how an $8 million reduction will affect a $380 million proposed budget to safely maintain the site's tank farms and a $690 million proposed budget to design and build plants to convert those wastes into glass.

Meanwhile, the Richland office, which manages everything else at Hanford, is to get $714 million, which is a $34 million cut from Congress' target of $748 million.

The Richland office's top priorities are removing spent nuclear fuel from the leak-prone K Basins, converting plutonium at the Plutonium Finishing Plant into safer forms and trying to accelerate cleanup along Hanford's Columbia River shore.

It is fuzzy on whether $714 million will be enough to meet the Richland office's legal obligations for 2002 because the cost estimates for accelerating river shore cleanup are somewhat hazy.

That's because a new river shore cleanup contract will be redesigned, put out for bids and awarded again through fiscal 2002 -- and Hanford and potential bidders are still crunching financial numbers.

In a budget memo, Roberson told DOE's field offices that next week budget calculations should include how the 2002 money will be spent, what results are expected and how the 2002 figures will affect DOE's fiscal 2003 budget.

DOE traditionally unveils its annual cleanup budget requests to Congress in late February.