The number of confirmed, active COVID-19 cases at Department of Energy nuclear cleanup sites fell again this week to 137 —meanwhile a boss at one of the smaller remediation sites said certain indoor work will not resume there until local coronavirus stats improve.
The 137 cases at the Office of Environmental Management (EM) this week marks a decrease of 16 from the 153 reported last week by the office last week, an office spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
The DOE branch last week acknowledged an error in its reported case count for the week of March 11. The EM office initially placed the total for that week at 101, before correcting the figure to 168.
On Wednesday, a manager with a Jacobs-led contractor told an online meeting of the West Valley Demonstration Project Citizen Task Force that certain close quarters work there cannot restart until infection rates in Western New York drop,
The area of Western New York where the state-owned West Valley Demonstration Project is located has an infection rate of more than 300 coronavirus infections per 100,000 people, said Kelly Wooley, the deputy general manager at the site for CH2M-BWXT West Valley.
“That is considered a high-risk region,” Wooley said.
The rate probably needs to drop below 200 per 100,000 people before West Valley gets the go-ahead from the Department of Energy to resume some “close contact work” at the site, Wooley said.
The work was suspended in November 2020 and remains on hold so far in 2021. The tasks being delayed include removing contamination on the surface of concrete as part of decontamination at the Product Purification Cell-South and various other inside work, according to Wooley’s slide presentation.
Sporadic Case, Vaccination Data Across Complex
At the Savannah River Site in South Carolina there are 25 employees currently quarantined with COVID-19, which is one less than the previous week’s total of 24, according to postings on a DOE contractor’s website for the federal complex near the Georgia state line.
South Carolina is now vaccinating medically low-risk people as young as age 55, sources there say. The head of the management contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, said last week he hopes to have more than a quarter of the 11,000 people at the site with at least one COVID-19 shot within a few weeks.
Site-specific vaccination data has been tough to come by as EM spokespeople at many sites have said their site’s management is not tracking such data.
At the DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, vaccinations are starting in a “phased approach” in accordance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board staff report dated March 5 and posted online this week.
The DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office is reporting 1 positive COVID-19 test result for employees at the transuranic waste site between March 18 and March 24, according to an emailed statement from prime Nuclear Waste Partnership. The underground salt mine complex has been hovering in the low single digits in weekly active cases for several weeks now.
There were three positive cases reported this week at the Hanford Site in Washington state, based upon daily advisories posted by a DOE contractor on a Hanford website.
“At the current time, HPMC [the occupational medicine contractor] has no vaccines available for the Hanford workforce,” DOE’s Hanford site manager, Brian Vance said in a March 17 online message to the site’s 11,000 workers. “Vaccinations are available in the community and those wanting a vaccination can determine their eligibility” can use online tools offered by the state’s Department of Health, Vance added.
“If you are currently eligible and desire to be vaccinated, please monitor all sources and obtain the vaccination at your earliest opportunity,” Vance said.
According to press reports, President Joe Biden said during a Thursday press conference, he now expects roughly 200 million Americans will receive a shot of vaccine by his 100th day in office, which is roughly the end of April.
The United States now has more than 30 million cases of the coronavirus and more than 546,000 deaths from the illness, as of Thursday night, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
