A total of 20 employees at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state informed management this week that they tested positive for COVID-19.
In addition, federal employees and contractors at Hanford were told Wednesday that visitors coming to the site must either attest they are fully vaccinated or provide evidence of a negative COVID-19 test within the prior 72 hours, according to a memo from DOE managers at the site. During the pandemic, Hanford is still visited by people delivering supplies or providing equipment testing or training, according to DOE.
The recent COVID cases and visitor restrictions were detailed in posts on a DOE Hanford website maintained by Leidos-led Hanford Mission Integration Solutions.
As of Thursday, Sept. 30, there were 66 people quarantined with COVID-19 at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, down from 101 people the week before.
Overall across the DOE Office of Environmental Management cleanup complex, there were 256 active cases this week which is down from 283 the prior week, an office spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
A couple of Environmental Management contractors have publicly required a COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment. Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the site management contractor at South Carolina complex, as well as UCOR, the Amentum-Jacobs environmental remediation contractor at the Oak Ridge Ridge Site in Tennessee, said in the past two months they require employees to take the shots.
On the National Nuclear Security Administration side of the weapons complex, Triad National Security, operator of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has required employee vaccinations.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions told Weapons Complex Monitor in a Thursday email that its employees have until Nov. 30 to be fully vaccinated or face job loss. Triad has set an Oct. 15 deadline at the Los Alamos lab and UCOR has given employees until Nov. 1 to comply.
On Sept. 9, President Joe Biden issued an executive order saying federal employees and federal contractors would soon be required to be inoculated for COVID-19. Feds are required to get their final shots by Nov. 8 and contractors a Dec. 8 deadline, according to guidance from a federal COVID safety task force.
As of Friday, there have been 43.4 million cases of COVID-19 in the United States and 698,000 deaths as a result, according to an online coronavirus resource tracker run by Johns Hopkins University. The site also estimates 56% of the U.S. population, which is more than 184 million people, are fully vaccinated.
