The Department of Energy and Fluor Hanford have renegotiated the deadlines and fees in their Hanford cleanup contract.

On paper, that translates to quicker deadlines and more money for Fluor's efforts through 2006.

However, Fluor still has to recrunch some schedules and cost estimates to map out exactly how it will do much of the revised work load. Those re-evaluations are to be done by June, said Wade Ballard, DOE's assistant manager for planning and integration at Hanford.

"These are very aggressive goals. We'll work with DOE to accomplish them," Fluor spokeswoman Judith Connell said Monday.

The contract was revised to implement DOE's nationwide efforts to speed up cleanup at Hanford and elsewhere. Fluor manages Hanford overall for the other cleanup contractors, and it is in charge of cleanup efforts outside the tank farms and Columbia River corridor.

Under the new contract, Fluor will see the total potential fee -- meaning profits -- it can earn over the next four years increase from about $120 million to about $170 million, Ballard said.

Fluor's current five-year contract began Oct. 1, 2001, and called for more than $3 billion worth of work to be done from 2001-06.

The revised contract adds about $400 million in extra work over four years for which Fluor is supposed to receive extra federal appropriations. But Fluor also will have to figure out how to do about $800 million of additional work over the four years for which no extra federal appropriations will be provided, Ballard said.

Fluor's fees -- the potential $170 million if everything is done perfectly and on schedule -- will depend on how the company copes with the extra work while accelerating cleanup.

Also, under the old contract, 70 percent of Fluor's fee was tied to making objective goals with another 30 percent linked to subjective evaluations. Under the revised contract, 100 percent of Fluor's fee is tied to objective cleanup goals.

Fluor's revised contract assumes that Hanford will receive the full $1.893 billion that DOE is seeking for fiscal 2003, which began Oct. 1, Ballard said. Between a fourth and a third of that amount is supposed to go to Fluor, with the rest going to Hanford's other contractors.

Right now, DOE's nationwide cleanup 2003 budget, including Hanford's, is in limbo in Congress and in the Bush administration until at least mid-January, if not until later.

The revised contract also assumes Hanford's annual cleanup budget will increase by yet-undetermined amounts in subsequent years, Ballard said. He said the federal Office of Management and Budget, which outranks DOE in preparing the Bush administration's annual budget requests to Congress, appeared impressed with Fluor Hanford's new contract. But he added that OMB has not approved its budget yet.

Here are highlights of the revised contract:

-- The deadline to finish removing radioactive fuel, sludge and water from the K Basins has moved from Sept. 30, 2006, to Oct. 30, 2005.

-- The deadline to clean out the Plutonium Finishing Plant complex has moved from 2009 to 2006. At that time, only the demolition of the buildings is to remain.

-- The timetable to clean out and possibly demolish the Fast Flux Test Facility is undetermined. Fluor and DOE are hashing out schedules and budgets. When that is complete, FFTF's deadlines will be added to the revised contract.

-- All 4,800 barrels of Hanford's above-ground transuranic wastes are supposed to be shipped to a New Mexico storage site by June 30, 2005. The schedule and costs for digging up and disposing of transuranic wastes currently underground are still undetermined.

-- Checking, possibly repacking, then burying currently stored low-level radioactive wastes is supposed to be done by Sept. 30, 2006. Future low-level wastes still have to be addressed. A Hanford solid waste environmental impact study, which is in its last stages, will influence how transuranic, chemical and low-level wastes will be further incorporated into the revised contract.

-- The decontamination and demolition of the old 233-S plutonium processing building is supposed to be done by June 30, 2004. DOE transferred this project from Bechtel Hanford to Fluor last summer. Fluor also will have to clean out and demolish two outlying old plutonium-laced buildings near B Plant and T Plant by 2006.

-- Fluor is tackling removing contaminated ground water across Hanford. This is another project transferred from Bechtel last summer. Fluor's master ground water plan has not been approved, so it also has not been nailed down in the revised contract.