Fluor Hanford expects to finish draining the last of the radioactive water from Hanford's leak-prone K East Basin by Monday, said Con Murphy, Fluor Hanford president.

"That's going to be a big achievement," he said.

He was among the speakers Thursday at the 14th Annual Nuclear Cleanup Caucus Briefings in Washington, D.C., organized by Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., for members of Congress and their staff.

Thursday's session covered work under DOE's Hanford Richland Operations Office, which includes most Hanford cleanup projects other than underground waste storage tanks and the vitrification plant.

About 200,000 gallons of water remained Thursday in the K East Basin near the Columbia River, Murphy said. Draining began in early February after more than six years of work at the K East and K West basins to remove 1,100 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel and 300 tons of debris such as fuel racks and to consolidate more than 40 cubic yards of highly radioactive sludge in underwater containers at the sturdier K West Basin.

Workers have been pumping about 1 million gallons of water from the basin into 5,000-gallon tanker trucks for the trip to the Effluent Treatment Facility. The draining is being done by remote operations to protect workers from radiation and fixative has been applied to the contaminated walls of the basin each time the water level drops four feet.

By March 2009, the K East Basin should be removed from the ground, said Dave Brockman, manager of the Richland Operations Office.

Work remains to treat the sludge, which has up to 300,000 curies of radioactivity. The project has fallen behind schedule after reviews of a planned treatment system raised issues and DOE and Fluor Hanford returned to the conceptual phase of the design for the project.

Murphy has challenged those working on the project to look at innovative ways to grout the sludge underwater, he said. That would reduce risk, cut costs and shorten the time needed for the work, he said.

Other work by Fluor Hanford has included retrieving 50 percent of temporarily buried waste, Murphy said. Waste suspected of being contaminated with plutonium was buried after 1970 until a national repository for the waste, called transuranic, was opened in New Mexico.

"We're getting better, but we need to get smarter because it is costing too much," he said.

Hanford has begun shipping its weapons-grade plutonium to Savannah River, S.C., and should have all of it off the site in 2009, Brockman said. DOE notified Congress last fall that the Savannah River site had been picked to consolidate weapons-grade plutonium, including plutonium left at Hanford after the end of the Cold War.

Washington Closure Hanford is under budget and ahead of schedule on work to clean up Hanford along the Columbia River, said President Chuck Spencer.

"Our goal is to reduce the footprint and to close sections of this site as we go through the next few years," he said. This year and next it will tackle higher risk and more complex work, he said.

As Hanford faces a potentially reduced budget for fiscal year 2009, seven legally binding Tri-Party Agreement deadlines are at risk because of funding, Brockman said. In addition, DOE is struggling with technical issues that put four additional deadlines in jeopardy, he said.

The Hanford budget proposed by the Bush administration for 2009 is $58 million less than in the current year. DOE still is analyzing how many jobs would be cut under that budget, Brockman said, but he estimated it would be "a few hundred jobs." The final budget will be set by Congress.

The cleanup caucus briefing for the DOE Hanford Office of River Protection, which is responsible for underground tanks and the vit plant, will be April 17 in Washington, D.C.