While the weekly infection numbers remain well below winter levels for the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch, agency officials are staying mum on when operations might return to something akin to pre-pandemic levels.
“Given the current rates of COVID across the county, we have no timeline or projections on when sites will return to pre-pandemic levels,” a spokesperson with the Environmental Management (EM) office said by email Thursday.
Four industry officials contacted by Weapons Complex Monitor this week speculated EM cleanup sites would start to return to a more normal level of operations in either summer of fall, splitting two-to-two. All, however, add it depends on how vaccinations progress.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week that at least 15% of the U.S. population are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Vaccination information remains hard to come by across the DOE cleanup complex. The prime contractor for operations at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina told a state advisory board two weeks ago that more than a quarter of the site’s 11,000 workers should be vaccinated within weeks.
One industry source this week said about 5,000 workers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have received at least the first of two shots. The Los Alamos complex has a workforce of more than 13,000, according to this fact sheet. Another said the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee was vaccinating its employees.
An Oak Ridge National Laboratory spokesperson Friday confirmed by email that the lab began vaccinating staff members and on-site contractors on March 12. About 70% have received at least one shot either at the laboratory or at other local providers, said the spokesperson.
The DOE is encouraging, but not requiring, workers to take the COVID-19 shots when available. Likewise, the agency is offering federal employees four hours of administrative leave to receive vaccination, the EM spokesperson said. Contractors are authorized to offer four hours of leave for their people to receive the shots as well, the spokesperson said.
In March 2020, EM scaled back to bare-bones operations across most of its 16 cleanup sites when the pandemic began to spread across the United States. Two months later it started very limited resumption of on-site work with mask mandates, physical distancing and other modifications in place.
In public forums, EM managers have repeatedly said they continue to use telecommuting to the maximum extent possible and this trend won’t disappear any time soon.
There are currently 132 active COVID cases in the EM complex this week or five fewer than last week, the spokesperson said. It is also down significantly from the 153 from two weeks ago. By comparison, the EM numbers were greater than 400 for much of January.
As of Thursday morning, there were 25 employees at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina currently quarantined with COVID-19, according to a DOE website run by a Savannah River contractor. The number is equal with last week’s total of 25 and still about flat with the prior week’s tally of 24.
There were two positive cases reported this week at the Hanford Site in Washington state, according to a website run by a contractor for DOE at Hanford. There were three cases reported the prior week.
The DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., confirmed two new active cases of COVID-19 March 25 and March 31, according to a Facebook post on the facility by its prime contractor. There was only one positive case at the transuranic waste disposal facility a week ago.
As of Friday morning, there have been 30.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 with about 553,000 deaths in the United States, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
