Part of a fine for a spill of radioactive tank waste at Hanford will stay in the community to improve public and Hanford worker safety instead of going to Olympia.

Much of the rest of the penalty may be forgiven if the Department of Energy corrects problems under the terms of an agreement reached by the DOE and the Washington Department of Ecology.

The state fined DOE $500,000 for problems that led to the spill of an estimated 85 gallons of diluted high level radioactive waste in July at Hanford. Although DOE was fined by the state, DOE is requiring contractor CH2M Hill Hanford Group to pay the fine.

Under the agreement announced Thursday, $200,000 of the fine will be used for a Hanford project to improve worker safety at the tank farms and to buy new equipment for the Tri-County Hazardous Materials Response Team.

"This new equipment will help reduce risk to our surrounding communities by improving the teams' ability to respond to chemical releases," Jane Hedges, nuclear waste program manager for the Department of Ecology, said in a statement.

The response team will receive $100,000 to buy a new truck for towing equipment to the scene of emergencies such as chemical spills. The money also will pay for new equipment, including generators, lighting to be used at emergency scenes, supplied air or other respirators and kits for patching pipes or containers leaking hazardous materials.

The team responds to incidents in Benton, Franklin, Yakima and Walla Walla counties and under a mutual aid agreement may respond elsewhere in the state.

For the second project, CH2M Hill will spend more than $200,000 to replace filters at the TY Tank Farm, an area of Hanford with underground tanks holding high-level radioactive waste. The state is allowing $100,000 of the cost to be applied to the fine.

The current filters are mounted on pipes that vent to the air above the tanks and require annual testing, which puts a large crew of workers at risk of exposure to hazardous chemical vapors and radiation when they are changed, according to the state. The new filters do not require testing, and replacing the filters requires fewer workers and no removal of the filter material.

It is work that CH2M Hill would have done eventually, but this will allow it to be done sooner, said Ron Skinnarland, waste management section manager for the Department of Ecology.

"Reducing worker exposure to mixed hazardous waste continues to be a top priority for Ecology," he said.

In addition to the $200,000 of the fine to be used for Hanford filters and community emergency equipment, CH2M Hill will pay a cash penalty of $50,000 to the state.

The state has agreed to suspend the remaining $250,000 of the fine if DOE meets two requirements.

First, it must make 38 improvements selected by the state for a list of actions developed by DOE and CH2M Hill to prevent future spills at the Hanford tank farms. The improvements must be completed by Sept. 30. They include changes such as better lighting at the tank farms to detect spills at night, a better camera system to survey the tank farms and a better system to detect small leaks.

CH2M Hill also will be required to retrieve waste from tanks for a year -- with at least 360 hours of active work -- without a similar incident. Pumping to empty leak-prone older tanks into newer double-shell tanks stopped when the spill was discovered July 27, but could resume in May.

The fine, issued under the legally binding Tri-Party Agreement, covers two violations that the state said caused about 85 gallons of diluted high level radioactive waste to spill onto the ground as a pump was being operated to retrieve waste from Tank S-102 at the end of a night shift.

The pumping system lacked back flow equipment that would have prevented waste from backing up into a rubber hose not designed to contain radioactive waste. In addition, inadequate engineering reviews were done on the pumping system even though a worker in 2002 questioned whether back flow protection was needed to prevent a spill.

"This was a serious event that could have been prevented," said Shirley Olinger, manager of the DOE Hanford Office of River Protection, in a statement.

DOE launched an extensive investigation to understand the cause of the spill and has worked closely with CH2M Hill to take numerous steps to correct problems, she said.

Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board site representatives questioned in a recently released report whether items in the corrective action plan for the spill were being checked off DOE's list before corrections were completely in place. Since then, DOE has revised its verification plan to make sure that all actions required to correct problems are completed, said DOE spokesman Erik Olds.

Paying for projects that enhance safety and help protect the environment rather than paying only a cash penalty is a way for CH2M Hill to produce some good out of a bad situation, said John Fulton, CH2M Hill president.

When the spill occurred, workers were slow to realize what had happened and workers were not ordered to take cover until eight hours later.

Because of the emergency response problem, CH2M Hill was interested in helping another agency that provides emergency response and it also wanted to make Hanford work safer, Fulton said.

The $250,000 penalty that CH2M Hill will be responsible for and the extra $100,000 it will spend on filter upgrades are in addition to $500,000 that DOE withheld from CH2M Hill's pay in November under terms of its contract.