As of this week, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has seen 2,009 members of its workforce contract COVID-19 so far in 2020.
The current number of federal and contractor workers infected with the coronavirus is 477, a spokesperson for Environmental Management (EM) said Thursday.
At the Hanford Site in Washington state, largest and most costly nuclear cleanup overseen by EM, there are 66 active cases and a grand total of 489 COVID-19 so far this year.
The Hanford and EM-wide numbers released this week show that DOE’s nuclear remediation office is hard hit, like everyone else, by the global pandemic. However, the office’s data indicate that very few infections seem to happen while workers are on the job, the spokesperson said. That is a similar assessment to what DOE and industry officials have offered in various public forums this fall.
To date, local, state and federal health agencies in the United States have confirmed 15.6 million cases of the virus with 292,000 people dying from it, according to a Johns Hopkins University dashboard that tracks COVID-19 data.
The EM spokesperson disclosed the COVID-19 count following a Weapons Complex Monitor inquiry this week after Hanford site manager Brian Vance told the Hanford Advisory Board he was not at liberty to share specifics about the disease’s effect on the site. Vance told the gathering he looks at the site’s COVID data regularly and shares the information with EM headquarters.
Vance did tell the advisory board that updates on Hanford positive cases are frequently posted on a Hanford website where employee alerts are regularly shared. The last such post was Saturday, Dec. 5, when there was a notice that a dozen workers had informed management of receiving positive tests.
Vance estimated 6,000 people are currently working onsite at the former plutonium production complex with another 4,000 telecommuting.
Vance was asked about the latest COVID-19 infections at his site by advisory board member Becky Holland of Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council, an umbrella group of labor unions at the site. Holland expressed interest in the number of people being tested, turning up positive and being quarantined.
Elsewhere in the EM complex, there were as of Friday morning 131 Savannah River Site employees quarantined with COVID-19, site prime Savannah River Nuclear Solutions said in a notice posted online. The 11,000-person federal complex in South Carolina near the Georgia border is shared by the DOE Office of Environmental Management and the National Nuclear Security Administration.
