There were no documented cases of COVID-19 among Department of Energy federal or contractor personnel at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, although one contractor was being tested for the disease.
This person works for Mission Support Alliance, of Richland, Wash., the site-wide support services contractor for the sprawling, remote Hanford Site in the state’s eastern region. The office building where the employee works is also being disinfected, according to a DOE notice.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management owns the former plutonium production hub, which wound down most operations in the 1970s, shut down its final production reactor in the 1980s, and is now being cleaned up.
If the Hanford worker’s test comes back positive, it could be the first documented case of the rapidly spreading 2019 novel conavirus within the DOE nuclear weapons complex. COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and has since spread globally in what the United Nations’ World Health Organization this week deemed a pandemic.
Confirmed U.S. cases have more than quintupled since this time last week to over 1,600, with 41 deaths, according to the latest numbers Friday from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of the fatal U.S. cases involved elderly residents of Washington state.
The nuclear weapons complex has already felt the effect of the disease’s spread.
On March 6, an employee of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California reported exposure to, but tested negative for, COVID-19. The weapons design lab subsequently halted business travel and visits to the California campus, at least through today.
On Thursday, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico activated its emergency operations center. “The activation occurred as a result of the State of NM closing all public schools and to ensure the continued safe operation of the WIPP facility,” according to a DOE notification.
Shortly before deadline this Friday, the Office of Environmental Management canceled all public tours of its 16 properties through the end of April, citing COVID-19.
A spokesperson for DOE Secretary Dan Brouillette did not immediately reply to a query Friday about whether there were any presumptive or confirmed infections, or reported exposure, to COVID-19 among the workforce at DOE headquarters in Washington. A spokesperson for the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had no immediate comment about possible cases at active nuclear weapons sites.
As of Thursday morning, however, there were “no reported cases [of COVID-19] within the entirety of the DOE complex,” Brouillette told the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board during an afternoon meeting in Washington.
While DOE is not yet restricting travel inside the United States in response to the 2019 coronavirus, it is encouraging offices to “begin reducing non-essential domestic travel,” according to a March 6 memo later posted to the agency’s website.
Every state that hosts an NNSA facility, plus Washington, D.C., has multiple confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
Most NNSA management and operations contractors either did not reply to requests for comment about COVID-19 cases at their sites, or declined to comment. NS&D Monitor attempted to reach spokespersons for all major NNSA labs and production sites, asking whether there were any presumptive or confirmed COVID-19 infections, or any reported employee exposure.
Of the NNSA sites that replied, four commented by deadline: the Kansas City National Security Campus in Kansas City, Missouri; the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; the Nevada National Security Site northwest of Las Vegas; and the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
A spokesperson for the Kansas City plant said, “Currently, there are no cases of COVID-19 associated with our workforce and there are no disruptions to the operations at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Kansas City National Security Campus.”
A Los Alamos spokesperson said the lab had, as of Friday morning, no confirmed infections, or reported exposures.
“Currently, there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 associated with our workforce at the NNSS or any of its remote locations,” a spokesperson for the former Nevada Test Site wrote in an email.
A spokesperson for Sandia wrote that “as of this moment, there are no presumptive or confirmed cases of COVID-19 among the Sandia workforce.”
Meanwhile, as COVID-19 spread, this week, nuclear-related events in Washington were canceled or postponed. On Wednesday, the Arms Control Association postponed its annual meeting to November from April. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, another arms-control advocate, postponed a Wednesday evening talk by Frank Klotz, the former administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories similarly canceled an annual, invite-only Washington get-together, the Strategic Weapons in the 21st Century Conference. The 13th annual summit was scheduled for Thursday.
Although there are no agency wide domestic travel bans, DOE did prohibit travel to countries such as China and Iran that have been identified by the Centers for Disease Control as having significant outbreaks of the 2019 coronavirus. Travel to certain parts of Italy and South Korea should also be avoided, DOE’s COVID-19 memo says. Energy Department officials should defer meetings with people traveling from these “do not travel” destinations identified by the State Department.
Some international travel is still allowed, according to the memo, but only if it is deemed “mission-essential” by heads of DOE departmental elements, and only if the destination is not one the prohibited countries.
Globally, the count of confirmed COVID-19 cases was over 137,000 on Friday, with nearly 5,100 deaths. The disease is distinct from influenza, although viruses cause both illnesses, and both illnesses present with fevers and respiratory symptoms such as coughing and shortness of breath.
Even President Donald Trump was reportedly exposed to someone who later tested positive for COVID-19, though a White House spokesperson this week said that “the president and vice president [Mike Pence] had almost no interactions with the individual who tested positive and do not require being tested at this time.”
