The COVID-19 pandemic helped sell the top brass at the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management on the value of telecommuting, the No. 2 official there said Wednesday.
When the DOE office was forced to roll back on-site work at nuclear remediation operations starting in mid-March, “a lot of people had their doubts” on the workability of that approach, Todd Shrader, principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, said during the ExchangeMonitor’s virtual RadWaste Summit.
Even as personnel began to return to their work sites in May, most “back room support work” is still happening remotely, Shrader said. That covers operations such as engineering, planning, and procurement, he said.
The COVID-necessitated remote work has gone so well that Environmental Management officials are considering whether it can be used in the future to save costs on office space and even attract future employees.
Of course, someone “cannot telework taking down a building,” Shrader said. Fortunately, outside construction by its nature better lends itself to maintaining physical distance than office work, he noted.
There are currently 82 active COVID-19 cases across the DOE nuclear cleanup complex, a department official said Thursday. That is down six from a week ago. The Office of Environmental Management is not revealing how many total COVID-19 cases it has recorded since the start of the pandemic.
Management of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which has significant operations for both the nuclear remediation office and DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), has confirmed a total of 488 cases to date among the 11,000-person workforce. The SRS total is up from 456 cases in the prior week. Of the total, 441 of the infected employees have recovered and been cleared to return to work, a spokesperson said Friday.
Fluor-BWXT, the remediation contractor at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, has confirmed 13 cases among its nearly 1,900-member workforce. Nine of those individuals have recovered, according to a document obtained by Weapons Complex Monitor.
Construction Work is Continuing
While he did not discuss specific figures, Shrader said enough people are now back on-site doing physical work at the 16 Environmental Management properties to keep most major construction projects going.
Some regulatory deadlines were missed due to workforce constraints created by the virus. Legal settlements in various jurisdictions often require that certain milestones be reached by a given date. However, many such agreements with states that host cleanup sites have a “force majeure clause,” which grant leeway for unforeseeable events, Shrader said.
In the spring, the Energy Department rolled out a four-step process to restart operations that is based upon guidance from the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The remobilization starts with planning (Phase 0) and progresses to almost pre-pandemic operations (Phase 3); it is based on a combination of safety measures taken by the various sites, combined with regional health statistics.
As on-site EM operations ramped up, the availability of adequate personal protective equipment was a concern, but “that issue is mostly cleared up,” Shrader said.
Since the pandemic began, the DOE office has increasingly been studying trends such as the number of cases experienced in a region per 100,000 people over 14 days . The metric helps the agency get an apples-to-apples comparison of virus trends while accounting for different population sizes.
There have been no changes to the restart status of nuclear cleanup sites since the Hanford Site in Washington state was given the green light to advance to Phase 2 on Aug. 31.
Sites in Phase 2 are Hanford, 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, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Other sites are in Phase 1 and none has entered Phase 3. The Environmental Management office conducts a deliberate review before allowing a site to advance to the next level, Shrader said.
The Uranium Mill Tailings Remediation Action (UMTRA) project in Moab, Utah, is unique in that it never demobilized below what would now be considered Phase 2 of the restart program, Shrader said during his presentation. He noted that Moab UMTRA is located in a rural area and much of its personnel consists of heavy equipment operators who already work at distance from one another.
