The FFTF then became a facility without a mission. When efforts to identify a long-term mission for the FFTF were unsuccessful, your agency moved the plant into a standby shutdown. Furthermore, funds spent on maintaining standby status could be better used to clean up the Hanford site, thereby improving environmental safety for downstream communities. We have strongly supported a decision to close this environmentally risky, fiscally wasteful and technologically unnecessary facility. We are very concerned about the cleanup of Hanford and earnestly feel that it should proceed without delay.
Contamination already threatens the river and surrounding inhabitants.
Our constituents must live and work under the shadow of that contamination, and will bear the heaviest burdens if we do not live up to the cleanup commitments made regarding Hanford. We cannot afford to divert our efforts from the core mission of an effective cleanup of the storage tanks and pools at Hanford and the other downstream contamination. Last year, Undersecretary Bill Magwood stated that the proposal to restart the FFTF lacked sufficient support from private industry and other federal agencies. He recommended to Secretary Richardson that the Department of Energy close the facility permanently. The decision to permanently close the FFTF was made final on January 19, 2001.