The Hanford nuclear reservation will be cleaned up sooner than Tri-Citians realize, said Keith Klein, the Department of Energy's Richland operations manager.

While that's good news for the environment, it also means the Tri-Cities soon will see less federal money, which has become the life blood of its economy, he said Thursday at a membership luncheon of TRIDEC. The federal government spends more than $2 billion annually at Hanford, not counting DOE's national laboratory in Richland.

"I would predict our funding may peak next year or the (year afterward)," Klein said. "It may have peaked this year."

Work at the site could last just another 10 to 20 years, not the 40 to 50 years predicted several years ago, he said.

Sometimes it must appear that all the government agencies with oversight at Hanford do is fight among each other, joked Nick Ceto, the Hanford project manager for the Environmental Protection Agency. But a significant amount of work is getting done to clean up Hanford, which produced plutonium for weapons, he said.

Hanford workers will finish moving spent fuel from the K Basins next year, Klein said. The basins held 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel in two leak-prone pools just 400 yards from the Columbia River.

Workers also will finish stabilizing more than four tons of plutonium next year, which will be put into containers for storage and shipped off the site.

Now the federal government spends $70 million a year on safeguards and security for the plutonium. Additional millions are spent to "baby-sit and process" the plutonium and maintain expensive heating and venting systems.

That security and processing money no longer will be needed as the plutonium is removed.

Plenty of uses remain in the short term for the freed-up money.

Some will be shifted to clean up of Hanford's canyons, Klein said. During the Cold War, Hanford operated five processing plants called "canyons" because of their cavernous main chambers.

In addition, work is just beginning to retrieve most of about 80,000 drums of waste from trenches. The waste will be shipped to a permanent underground storage site near Carlsbad, N.M.

Klein predicted cleanup efforts will continue to speed up as experience leads to more efficiency.

"The only way to sustain cleanup dollars is to show progress," Klein said. Without successes to point to, Hanford will not be able to compete for federal dollars in a tight economy and with demands to support military efforts in the Middle East.

Money also is key to maintaining nuclear capabilities for research in the community, Klein said in answer to a question at the meeting.

The Radiochemical Processing Laboratory is one of the buildings scheduled for destruction during cleanup of the 300 Area along the Columbia River just north of Richland.

Supporters of developing nuclear medicine industries in the Tri-Cities are concerned the lab building will be destroyed before a replacement facility is built for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. They also want to keep nuclear materials that could be used for medical or other research in the Tri-Cities.

But Klein said his job is cleanup, and advocates of a nuclear medicine industry will need leadership, a sponsor and a funding source.

The northern portion of the 300 Area, which does not include the nuclear laboratory, could be cleaned up and ready for new businesses to be developed by fall, Ceto said. The land includes 117 acres by the river.