Hanford Openness Workshops scheduled

Public workshops aimed at fostering open decision making at the Hanford nuclear site and improving public access to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) information are being held this year in Richland, Seattle, Spokane, and Portland, Ore. The first workshop was in Richland on Feb. 10, beginning the second year of Hanford Openness Workshops — public meetings designed to help the DOE improve efforts to release information important to public understanding and decision making at Hanford.

The workshops are a collaboration of regional public interest groups, citizen representatives, Native American tribes, the DOE Richland Operations Office, the Washington State Department of Ecology, the Oregon Office of Energy and the UW Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation.

After holding four workshops from October 1997 through May 1998, participants released a report in August 1998 that included 51 recommendations to the DOE for improving openness. The DOE Richland Office responded to the report in a document published in December 1998. The collaborating organizations agreed to provide funding and in-kind services to support a second series of workshops in 1999.

Workshops still to come in the series: