There are 74 active cases of COVID-19 currently within the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management’s nuclear cleanup sites, an agency spokesperson said late Thursday.
That is slightly up from the 70 active cases the prior week across the 16 former Cold War and Manhattan Project sites overseen by the office, but still less than the 84 reported two weeks ago.
The Office of Environmental Management discloses active cases in the cleanup complex, but not the total number of cases recorded since the pandemic began in the United States earlier this year.
Management of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina Friday morning reported 545 cases of COVID-19, which is up 17 from its previous week’s total of 528 cases. Thus far 508 members of the site’s workforce there have recovered and been cleared to resume work. The DOE facility along the Georgia line has a staff of 11,000 people, including contractors and federal civil servants, with large operations for both DOE’s cleanup office and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
Meanwhile, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico confirmed two new COVID-19 infections during the seven days ended Sept. 29, according to a Thursday press release from Nuclear Waste Partnership, the prime contractor for the underground transuranic waste site near Carlsbad.
Altogether, the salt mine disposal site has recorded 39 positive cases, with 22 of the individuals recovered per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, at deadline.
Meanwhile, the Hanford Site in Washington state, DOE’s largest and most costly cleanup property, did not report any new cases of the virus on its regularly updated public website this week, although it noted a couple of its 11,000 workers were tested this week. There have been an estimated 80 or so Hanford workers infected with the virus so far in 2020, based mostly incidents reported in daily updates on the Hanford website since March.
Hanford remains in Phase 2 of the DOE’s remobilization program to gradually resume pre-pandemic work levels on-site. The former plutonium production complex had upwards of 6,000 employees back working inside the fence as of last week. Many others continue to telework.
The Department of Energy scaled back on-site operations at nearly all of its cleanup properties in mid-March, in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. At that point, the Hanford on-site workforce was only 10% to 15% of its usual staffing level,
A spokesman for the Office of Environmental Management said there were no changes in DOE-approved operating phases this week.
The four-stage process began with Phase 0, or planning and preparation, and will eventually culminate with Phase 3, or a return to almost pre-pandemic operations on-site, albeit with the ongoing COVID-19 precautions including face coverings and physical distancing.
In between are Phase 1, when key officials and people with little need for personal protective equipment return, and Phase 2, when even more people return, including those engaged in moderately hazardous work requiring protective gear.
None of the 16 Cold War nuclear cleanup sites are currently in Phase 3.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is in Phase 2, as are Hanford, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Idaho National Laboratory, the Nevada National Security Site, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and the Uranium Mill Tailings Removal Action project in Moab, Utah. Moab, however, never scaled back on-site work as much as the others.
Other sites are in Phase 1.
Parsons Overcomes COVID-19 Flare Up in Preparing for Launch of SWPF
A COVID-19 outbreak hit the Salt Waste Processing Facility roughly a month before its scheduled opening at the Savannah River Site, but the outbreak is under control now, the facility’s prime contractor said Wednesday.
More than 40 members of the operations or maintenance staff for Parsons were unavailable during late August due to COVID-19, according to a regular staff report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board dated Sept. 4. That tally counts not only confirmed cases, but absences associated with the disease that could have been caused by exposures outside of work.
For about a day, only one of the eight qualified shift operations managers were available, according to the report. “This individual worked day shift while a control room manager took control of night shift,” as allowed by the company’s technical safety requirements, the report said.
Parsons spokesman Bryce McDevitt said by email Wednesday that “all previous COVID issues are under control.” The company has nearly 500 employees at SWPF and is adequately staffed to start full operations at the Salt Waste Processing Facility, which is expected to start receiving radioactive material early the week of Oct. 5.
Paul Dabbar, the Department of Energy’s undersecretary for science, went to Savannah River Sept. 24 to dedicate the plant designed to treat 31 million gallons of tank waste at the site. The plant will process most of the salt waste inventory by separating highly radioactive constituents and vitrifying it into a glass-like substance.
Signed in 2003, Parsons’ contract to design and build the 140,000-square-foot facility to treat salt waste left over from Cold War era nuclear weapons work is worth about $2.3 billion. The original contract envisioned a wide-ranging cost of anywhere from less than $700 million to about $2.6 billion.
