The Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup sites will stick with “maximum telework” for the time being, the No. 2 boss at the Office of Environmental Management said Tuesday.
“As of right now there is no change in our status that we have been in for several months of maximum telework,” Todd Shrader, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, told an online meeting of the chairs of the Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Boards.
As the Office of Environmental Management gradually emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, its stance on permanent telework will depend in part on policy adopted by DOE and the rest of the federal government, Shrader said. While headquarters staff can easily work from home, it is different for people who physically turn valves at nuclear sites, he added.
“Can you make vaccines mandatory” is a question that comes up, Shrader said. But this is not something DOE is forcing for the COVID-19 vaccines that have received only “emergency use” authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), he said.
Under an emergency use authorization, FDA can allow use of unapproved products “in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met” and there are no other approved alternatives, according to an FDA website.
The Office of Environmental Management is “partially” keeping track of how many members of its 33,000-member workforce are vaccinated, Shrader said. Management clearly knows when an occupational health contractor conducts an on-site vaccination clinic as happened recently at Hanford. Likewise, Environmental Management also gets word when workers at the sites take advantage of four hours of complementary leave to go get vaccinated.
“What we don’t know is if someone has gotten the vaccine within the community,” Shrader said. The Environmental Management executive did not offer any estimates on what percentage of the nuclear cleanup workforce is at least partially vaccinated. He added that the vaccines are gaining greater acceptance as more people receive their shots.
Shrader also noted that he has received the first of his two vaccine shots.
An April 23 notice posted on the Idaho National Laboratory website indicated vaccinations are now available on-site there, although it was not clear if this included cleanup workers for Fluor Idaho.
Number of Active COVID Cases Dips in Nuclear Cleanup Complex
There are currently 101 confirmed active cases of COVID-19 in the DOE’s nuclear cleanup complex this week, a drop of 15 from last week, a spokesperson for the Office of Environmental Management said by email Thursday.
The figure is also slightly lower than the 105 recorded at Environmental Management two weeks ago.
As of this morning, there are 36 employees currently quarantined with COVID-19 at the Savannah River Site, according to a post on a DOE website run by a Savannah River contractor. That represents an increase of 14 over last week’s figure of 22.
As of Friday morning, there have been 31.9 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States since the pandemic began and 570,000 deaths as a result, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
As of Thursday, one in three people in the United States over the age of 18 years are fully vaccinated and more than half of U.S. adults have received at least one dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
