There are 66 cases of active coronavirus infection among personnel for nuclear cleanup operations overseen by the Energy Department Office of Environmental Management, an agency representative said Thursday.
That is more than double the 31 active cases of COVID-19 disclosed a week ago for the Environmental Management complex.
The agency did not offer any theory for the increase, although infections are now surging nationally – with roughly 3.5 million cases and nearly 138,000 deaths to date in the United States, according to data from the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health departments.
There were no additional COVID-19 deaths within the Environmental Management complex this week, following a death reported last week among the workforce for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The Office of Environmental Management declines to disclose the total number of COVID-19 infections among its federal and contractor workforce since the viral pandemic took root in the United States in early 2020. Likewise, it does not provide site-by-site rundowns of infections for each of the 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project remediation sites.
As of Friday morning, the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina confirmed a total of 131 cases of COVID-19 among its workforce. Sixty-six of those employees have recovered and been cleared to return to work, according to the website for the agency’s SRS Operations Office. The Energy Department complex near the Georgia border employs 11,000 federal and contractor personnel, most of them involved in operations for either the Environmental Management office or DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
A week ago, SRS confirmed that an employee of Fluor-led operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Services had died as a result of COVID-19. It is believed the second death involved a staffer at Energy Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The three South Carolina counties around SRS – Aiken, Allendale, and Barnwell – together have 7,174 COVID-19 cases, according to a state health website as of Friday.
Another major DOE complex, the Hanford Site in Washington state, recorded one more COVID-19 case on Thursday, bringing the total to 28 cases there since the pandemic began. Five have been confirmed in just the past week.
Benton and Franklin counties, the two localities where the sprawling Hanford facility is located, together reported 5,250 COVID-19 infection as of Friday, according to the Washington state Department of Health. They have been among the hardest=hit counties in the state.
During the coming week, the former plutonium production facility will remain in Phase 1 of DOE’s COVID restart program, Site Manager Brian Vance announced Thursday. Likewise, SRS remains in Phase 1.
The Idaho National Laboratory, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the West Valley Demonstration Site in New York, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and the Nevada National Security Site are all now in Phase 2 – with Brookhaven getting the green light this week.
All other cleanup sites, which earlier went to minimal operations, remain in Phase 1.
With the exception of the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remediation Action (UMTRA) Project in Utah, which maintained a normal level of operations, the DOE remediation operations reduced staffing to skeleton crew levels from late-March through late-May, with most employees either working remotely or collecting paid leave.
The sites are now pursuing a four-part remobilization plan. It starts with planning in Phase 0. Phase 1 involves bringing back people in high-priority and low-risk jobs. Phase 2 builds on Phase 1 by remobilizing most employees whose job is best done on-site – provided there is enough personal protective equipment for workers who need it. The eventual goal is to reach Phase 3, which entails a return to on-site staffing nearly approximating pre-COVID levels. The movement from one level to another is based on COVD-19 infections and other regional health data.
The Energy Department headquarters offices in downtown Washington, D.C., and the neighboring Maryland suburbs, are in Phase 2, but probably will not move to Phase 3 anytime soon, the agency acknowledged this week.
According to a memo from Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, “it is unlikely that local conditions in the [Washington area] will support a fully ‘back to normal’ Phase 3 return to the workplace as originally envisioned in the HQ Plan.”
Instead, personnel who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, as well as those with children or other dependents to care for, will be allowed to request permission to continue telework whenever the Energy Department does move on from Phase 2 of its reopening plan. During that phase, some 1,400 people returned to the agency’s Forrestal Building in downtown Washington and the Germantown building in Maryland.
“We are not announcing the start of Phase 3 at this time and there is no specific date for the start of Phase 3 at Headquarters,” Brouillette wrote in a statement posted to DOE’s website on Tuesday.
