Washingtonians once counted on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation being cleaned up in their lifetimes. Increasingly, it’s looking like not even their great-grandchildren will live to see the day.

The cleanup project long ago veered from the 30-year timeline laid out in 1989 when the federal government committed itself to remedying the toxic legacy of Cold War nuclear production.

The work has been stymied by the complexity and scale of the task as well as human error, but its biggest roadblock by far has been money. Hanford cleanup needs a lot of it, and the federal government routinely fails to deliver what the site needs to keep progress on track.

Now President Bush has proposed the lowest level of nuclear cleanup funding since 1997. His budget would put the biggest cleanup challenge – disposing of the witch’s brew contained in 177 underground tanks — on pace for completion somewhere around 2150.

That date is not a typo. At the rate of one tank a year – the level of funding proposed by Bush – it would take 140 years for the federal government to do what it first promised to complete by 2018. In all, the Department of Energy expects to miss 18 cleanup deadlines at Hanford in the next two year.

Earlier this month, the Senate approved a nationwide cleanup budget increase of $500 million over the administration’s proposal, but even that is short of 2006 funding.

There is good reason for all Washingtonians to worry. Even some of the double-wall tanks are past their design life; none of them is built to last another century and a half. They will eventually fail, and when they do, the leaking waste will join the plume of contaminated groundwater headed toward the Columbia River.

State officials have been trying to negotiate a new cleanup schedule, but haven’t had much success. Their next option is to sue.

The last time Washington hauled the Department of Energy into court a decade ago, it won a consent decree that led to the removal of liquid wastes from the site’s leak-prone single-wall tanks.

But taking the dispute to a judge also has a considerable downside. An unresolved lawsuit gives Congress an excuse to delay giving Hanford the money it needs.

Nuclear cleanup is not cheap nor easy, but the nation cannot forget the sacrifices communities across the country made in the name of national defense. We have the know-how and moral imperative to get the job done, if only the federal government will show it’s serious about allowing the work to proceed.