The Bush administration has abandoned its promise to accelerate cleanup at Hanford and other large nuclear weapons sites, said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., in a speech Monday in Arizona.

He compared the administration's treatment of the budget to a soap opera: "Tonight, watch the tragic story of a jilted bride lured by promises of accelerated cleanup funding, only to be left at the altar, forgotten and neglected," according to a copy of his remarks.

He made the speech at the 34th annual Waste Management Conference, organized by the Waste Management Symposia, a nonprofit group for nuclear waste management education.

The Bush administration has followed a plan of cleaning up and closing smaller sites, saying dollars then would be shifted to large sites like Hanford.

Under that plan, the Rocky Flats, Colo., and Fernald, Ohio, sites were closed, but the budget dollars were not rolled over to larger sites as promised, Hastings said.

The administration's proposed budget for nationwide cleanup in fiscal 2009, which begins in October, is $5.5 billion. That's down from a budget of $6.1 billion in 2001 at the start of the Bush administration and a peak of $7.3 billion in 2005.

"The accelerated cleanup initiative could have been a lasting environmental legacy of the Bush administration," Hastings said. "Instead, what started as a true success of real cleanup progress has dwindled away."

For Hanford, the 2009 budget proposed by the administration would mean a cut of $58 million. But the impact on jobs is greater than that number would suggest, Hastings said.

Work on ground water cleanup would receive more money, but other labor-intensive activities were hit hard, he said.

Those projects include cleanup of Hanford along the Columbia River, which is being done by Washington Closure Hanford, and digging up temporarily buried waste contaminated with plutonium for permanent disposal off site, which is being done by Fluor Hanford.

"The toll of this budget on river corridor cleanup is immense," Hastings said.

The plan was to clean up areas along the river by as early as 2012 to eliminate risk to the river, shrink the contaminated portion of Hanford to 75 square miles at its center and reduce overhead costs for the site.

"Instead the 2009 budget would cause hundreds of layoffs and hobble the ability to achieve on-time cleanup," Hastings said. The number of layoffs required at Hanford based on the administration's 2009 budget has been estimated at 500 by Hanford observers.

Under federal law, Hanford contractors must give layoff notices 60 days in advance, which means they would have to start taking action by summer, Hastings said.

However, in the past layoffs have been delayed if action in congressional appropriations bills would increase funding.

"The risk, however, is that the final law doesn't ultimately provide the increase, which means even deeper layoffs," Hastings said.

He predicted Congress would not be able to pass a Hanford budget on time for 2009 for a third year in a row, given spending limits imposed by Bush and the possibility that Congress will decide to take its chances with a new president.

"There is an incredibly high certainty that spending bills will not become law before December or February," he said.