The official Facebook for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management has hit 1,000 likes.
“Thank you to everyone who ‘likes’ EM’s national Facebook page,” the agency’s nuclear cleanup branch said on the social media site. “We recently surpassed 1,000 likes since launching our page in late May this year. We will continue to share progress on EM’s nuclear cleanup across the complex on our Facebook page, and keep up with our special hashtag themes — #TearDownTuesday, #WildlifeWednesday and #FlashbackFriday.”
The 1,000-like milestone was reached Nov. 4, Steve Tetreault, a DOE spokesman in Washington, wrote in a Thursday email. The total number of likes stood at 1,026 as of Friday.
At deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor, most of the content on the EM Facebook page was photos, roughly 170 of them. The page also features three original uploaded videos, including a clip of the 2010 demolition of seven 120-foot towers at the old X-533 Switchyard at the Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio.
The single-largest chunk of photos, just over 40 percent, are of either DOE or contractor employees at various sites. Pictures of wildlife and their habitats make up the next-largest part of the total at a little more than 30 percent. Photos of cleanup operations in progress make up a bit more than 20 percent of all images. The remainder consists of a few miscellaneous post, including a pair of logos and a cake featuring the “One EM” teambuilding logo.
For comparison’s sake, the U.S. space agency NASA — the federal government’s 8,000-ton social-media gorilla — has more than 7,000 photos on its Facebook page, which has garnered 17.5 million likes.
NASA, to be fair, had a big head start on EM. The space agency — a DOE customer since practically the dawn of the space age for the plutonium-238 that powers some robotic probes — started its Facebook page way back in 2008.
