The management and operations contractor for the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico learned of 13 new cases of COVID-19 at the disposal facility just prior to Thanksgiving.
Nuclear Waste Partnership, DOE’s prime contractor at the transuranic waste disposal site, reported the latest set of infections in a press release last week. Those cases were logged between Nov. 18 and Nov. 23.
That brings the total number of COVID-19 cases at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) to 137 since the coronavirus pandemic was confirmed to have reached the U.S. early this year. The latest weekly case figures represent a small decrease for WIPP, compared with the 20 new cases of COVID-19 the site publicly reported during each of the two previous weeks.
A WIPP worker died recently, though Nuclear Waste Partnership and DOE have not confirmed that COVID-19 was the cause. An official with the New Mexico Environment Department disclosed the fatality earlier this month, saying that the prevalence of COVID-19 at and around WIPP was one reason she refused to extend a temporary work approval to continue sinking a new underground shaft the mine needs to increase the rate at which personnel can emplace waste shipments.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, 82 employees were quarantined last week because of COVID-19 at DOE’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., according to the most recent tally published to the site’s emergency operations web page. Site management no longer reports the total number of COVID-19 cases at Savannah River. There were 686 confirmed cases at the site as of Nov. 16, the last day on which management reported the figure.
As of Thanksgiving week, were there were 298 active COVID cases across the DOE Office of Environmental Management complex, which is up 23 from the Nov. 19 total, a spokesperson said at press time Monday.
As of Monday morning, there are 13.4 million cases of COVID-19 and nearly 267,000 fatalities from the illness in the United States, according to data from state, local and national health agencies tracked by Johns Hopkins University.
