The Hanford budget for fiscal year 2009 needs to be increased to $2.014 billion, according to Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.

This week, he led a bipartisan effort to make that request in a letter to leadership of the House subcommittee that will consider the Hanford budget.

In addition, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and seven other senators sent a letter to Senate subcommittee leadership asking for more money for Department of Energy cleanup sites across the nation.

The Bush administration has proposed cutting Hanford funding in 2009 by $58 million. Not only did Hastings' letter oppose that cut, but it said the administration proposal is $183 million short of a "responsible level."

The administration's proposal "would risk stalling or halting critical cleanup projects," said the letter sent by 13 Northwest lawmakers to the leadership of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water.

The letter asked that the administration's proposal of $165 million for Washington Closure Hanford cleanup along the Columbia River at Hanford be increased to $242 million, the amount set in the contract agreement.

"We are concerned that without the requested increase that Tri-Party Agreement milestones will be missed and hundreds of jobs could be eliminated," the letter said.

It also called for adding $69 million to the administration proposal for retrieving temporarily buried transuranic waste and shipping it to a national repository in New Mexico. The waste is contaminated with plutonium. The $69 million would bringing spending back to the 2008 level, which the letter said is the minimum needed to meet legally binding deadlines.

The final request in the letter was for a $37 million increase for work at Hanford's tank farms, where 53 million gallons of radioactive waste are being stored until they can be treated for disposal.

The additional money would be used to empty leak-prone underground tanks, continue to test bulk vitrification as a way to treat some of the waste and help make a decision on how to treat waste that the $12.2 billion vitrification plant could not treat in a reasonable time as it now is designed.

The letter was signed by Hastings and Washington Republican Dave Reichert; Washington Democrats Norm Dicks, Jim McDermott, Jay Inslee, Adam Smith, Brian Baird and Rick Larsen; Oregon Republican Greg Walden and Oregon Democrats David Wu, Earl Blumenaur, Peter DeFazio and Darlene Hooley.

The Senate letter called on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development to restore cuts proposed by the Bush administration in nationwide cleanup and return to the funding level of fiscal year 2006.

The letter was signed by Cantwell; Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., and senators from Idaho, New Mexico, Ohio and Tennessee.

Earlier this month, Cantwell and Hastings requested more money for cleanup from Senate and House Budget Committee leadership. The Senate approved an overall cleanup budget level increase of $500 million over the administration's proposal, which is still short of 2006 funding.