More than half of the Department of Energy’s 11,000-member workforce at the Hanford Site are back inside the fence, a Department of Energy official said Wednesday.
Hanford is bringing 190 additional workers back onsite this week, DOE’s Erik Olds, told the Hanford Advisory Board during an online meeting. That brings the current number of federal and contract workers physically at the site to 6,000.
“That is a bit of a milestone,” Olds said, adding there are now more staffers on-site than telecommuting. Olds is the deputy integration manager for DOE for the direct-feed-low-activity waste project for the Waste Treatment Plant.
Some people will, however, continue to telework for the foreseeable future, Olds added.
On Aug. 31, remediation work at the former plutonium production complex advanced from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s remobilization program to gradually restore operations to pre-COVID-19 levels. The process started with planning and preparation, known as Phase 0. Phase 1 entails bringing back only key employees and those whose work requires little in the way of personnel protective equipment. Phase 2 adds people whose jobs can require moderate levels of protective gear.
The ultimate goal is reaching Phase 3 where on-site staffing is nearly equal to pre-pandemic levels.
Olds said the site might ultimately bring back up to 85% of its people onsite before advancing to Phase 3.
Advancing from one level to another hinges on how things are going at the site, availability of protective equipment, coronavirus infection rates in the region and relevant local, state and federal orders on COVID-19.
Even with bringing more people back, progress is sometimes slow, given some work has to occur sequentially rather than at the same time. This is to lessen the proximity of staffers to each other and reduce the number of in-person interactions, Olds said.
None of the 16 Cold War nuclear cleanup sites are currently in Phase 3.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico recently moved into Phase 2, according to a representative for the DOE Office of Environmental Management.
In addition to Los Alamos and Hanford, the other sites in Phase 2 are the Idaho National Laboratory, the Nevada National Security Site, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, Portsmouth, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and the Uranium Mill Tailings Removal Action project in Moab, Utah. Moab is unique because so many of its workers are heavy equipment operators, and the site never scaled back as much as the others.
Other sites remain in Phase 1.
The level of coronavirus infections in South Carolina is still high enough to keep the Department of Energy from moving any closer to pre-COVID-19 operations at the Savannah River Site, a senior site official said Monday.
The DOE complex next to the Georgia line will probably stay in Phase 1 a while longer, Michael Budney, Savannah River Site operations manager for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, told the site’s government-chartered Citizens Advisory Board.
Confirmed COVID-19 infections in and around Aiken have fallen since a midsummer peak, though the region and the state at large saw a spike after the Labor Day holiday. Budney said local mask-wearing requirements at the site and in the Aiken area have helped.
Savannah River Site officials said Friday that since the pandemic began, a total of 528 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed among the workforce. The figure is 16 from the prior week’s running total of 512. So, far 498 employees who got the virus have recovered and been cleared to resume work.
Savannah River Site, which has 11,000 employees and operations for both the DOE Environmental Management office and the National Nuclear Security Administration, has been a leader in transparency on COVID-19 in the federal weapons complex.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management does not release figures on its overall number of cases since the pandemic began, however it has 70 active cases, a federal representative said Thursday. That is 13 fewer than the 83 within the cleanup complex the prior week.
In a Thursday post on Twitter, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant reported that an employee tested positive for the virus this week. The individual, who was last onsite Sept. 16 was not showing symptoms. Through Tuesday of this week the waste disposal center has recorded a total of 37 positive cases and 18 of those have recovered, according to the social media post.
Also this week, the Hanford Site reported a positive case via its website. There have been about 80 Hanford workers infected with the virus so far in 2020, based on anecdotal reports.
