The Department of Energy and its regulators will meet Wednesday for what is expected to be the final high-level negotiating session to discuss major changes in the Tri-Party Agreement's legal deadlines for Hanford cleanup.

If an agreement cannot be reached, Gov. Chris Gregoire and Attorney General Rob McKenna will discuss the state's next action, said Nolan Curtis, program administration section manager for the Washington State Department of Ecology.

That could be a lawsuit by the state to attempt to force DOE to increase work to meet legally binding deadlines for Hanford cleanup under the Tri-Party Agreement.

When Gregoire met with Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman in late February, she agreed to a final meeting between state and federal officials to see if an impasse could be broken in Tri-Party Agreement negotiations. Negotiations began last spring as it became clear that DOE could not meet major deadlines, but negotiations have been on hold since October.

Next week's meeting will be held in Seattle. DOE will be represented at the negotiating table by Ins Triay, DOE's principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management. Jay Manning, director of the Department of Ecology, will represent the state. The third Tri-Party agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, had not confirmed its lead negotiator for the session Wednesday.

While the governor has not appeared eager to take legal action, top state officials said last year they saw only three options to resolve the issue of missed deadlines: do nothing, renegotiate deadlines to take into account DOE's technical and budget issues, or take DOE to court to get deadlines enforced.

The proposal under negotiation when talks were put on hold in October would accept a delay from 2011 to 2019 in the start of operations of the vitrification plant to turn millions of gallons of radioactive waste held in underground tanks into a stable glass form for proposal. It would extend the deadline for emptying radioactive waste from 149 old, leak-prone underground tanks from 2018 to 2040.

In exchange for the delays, DOE would be required to do more work to protect ground water and the Columbia River and prepare a lifecycle cost and schedule report for Hanford.