The Department of Energy’s 2020 groundwater sampling goals for the Hanford Site in Washington state are going to miss their target largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, an agency official said Tuesday.
Out of the 2,500 or so groundwater samples normally taken at the former plutonium production complex in the course of a year, DOE will probably miss between 200 and 250 of them, Michael Cline, the project director for soil and groundwater cleanup with the agency’s Richland Operations Office, told an online meeting of the DOE-chartered, citizen-staffed Hanford Advisory Board.
Groundwater is a pathway for contaminants such as nitrates and hexavalent chromium to enter the Columbia River. Groundwater work is overseen by contractor CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation under a contract that runs until Jan. 24, after which Central Plateau Cleanup Co. is scheduled to take over the work.
Cline made the remarks during a question and answer session after his presentation to the Hanford Advisory Board.
“COVID was a big impact on the site,” Cline said. “We were not sampling for three to five months. That’s just a fact.”
Cline said DOE is “trying to catch up, we have five sampling crews working 50-hour weeks.”
Amid a pandemic unprecedented in the history of DOE Environmental Management cleanup, the agency is seeking force majeure variances to cleanup milestones in Washington and other states due to COVID-19.
Like other DOE Office of Environmental Management cleanup sites, Hanford reduced its onsite workforce to mission-critical, bare-bones levels from mid-March to late May while it drafted plans for limiting the spread of COVID-19.
The staffing level inside the fence has gradually increased since then and Hanford’s site manager, Brian Vance, has said that probably 60% of the reservation’s 11,000-member workforce are back onsite.The rest are teleworking.
The coronavirus was not the only problem affecting water sampling this year.
“We lost a week of sampling due to smoke during the end of summer” due to wildfires, said Cline.
