The Richland City Council will decide Tuesday whether to help pay for an engineering study that could determine how a proposed $3 billion nuclear fuel plant gets its electricity — and how much that costs the city.
The agreement on the Oct. 6 agenda would commit Richland to fund part of the cost of designing a new intertie with the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that supplies most of the region's wholesale power. BPA has estimated the full engineering project at about $12.3 million and has said it won't start the work without funding in place, according to the Tri-City Herald. The proposed plant would draw 100 megawatts, the council's agenda says.
The power would serve the Northwest Advanced Clean Energy Park, a 425-acre site where Washington Energy LLC, the entity tied to nuclear fuel company General Matter, is considering building a 1 million-square-foot facility to manufacture advanced nuclear fuel.
How Richland got here
The city put itself in the running for the project in January 2025, when the council agreed to sell a land option on the 425 acres for up to $26.8 million, according to Tri-Cities Business News. At the time, the Spokesman-Review reported the plant could bring 1,000 jobs and was tied directly to the 2024 federal ban on Russian uranium imports, which pushed the U.S. to build domestic capacity for high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, used in advanced reactors. The federal government later committed $900 million to General Matter for that purpose.
Early cost estimates for the project were inconsistent. The Seattle Times reported the plant was first pitched at $4.5 billion, a figure state and local economic-development officials could not reconcile with the $3 billion price tag now attached to the project.
The company's footprint at Hanford has since grown beyond the 425-acre park. The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management has separately agreed to lease General Matter the Fuels and Materials Examination Facility in Hanford's 400 Area, a building constructed in the late 1980s that sat unused after 1993, according to Tri-Cities Business News. That announcement came the same day the Richland council voted to extend the company's deadline for due diligence on the original land deal.
What it means for ratepayers
The timing raises a question for Richland utility customers: how a costly new industrial power line gets funded just as the city's own electric bills are rising. The council approved an 8.5% retail electric rate increase effective Jan. 1, 2026, citing higher wholesale and transmission costs from BPA, according to CitizenPortal.ai. Whether the city's share of the $12.3 million intertie study would come from utility reserves, rate revenue or another source has not yet been detailed publicly.
TRIDEC and the Port of Benton are promoting the broader Northwest Advanced Clean Energy Park as a multi-tenant site for clean-energy industry, not a single-company campus, according to TRIDEC.
What's next
The council meets Tuesday, Oct. 6. Residents can review the agenda packet and attend the meeting to weigh in before any vote. Open questions include whether Richland remains General Matter's only candidate site, what triggers the start of construction, and whether the company is still operating within the multiyear window it was given to exercise its land option. The Herald's report Saturday did not specify Richland's exact dollar share of the BPA study cost, a detail the council packet may clarify before Tuesday's vote.
