There are currently 83 active cases of coronavirus infections within the nuclear cleanup complex overseen by the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, an agency source said Thursday.
That is one up from the 82 active cases of COVID-19 the prior week. The DOE nuclear cleanup office does not release the number of total cases recorded since the pandemic took hold in the United States in the first quarter of this year.
Thus far in 2020, there have been two fatalities within the EM complex as a result of the pandemic, one at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the other at the Energy Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico confirmed two new infections between Sept. 10-15, the site’s prime contractor said in a Wednesday press release.
Both individuals show symptoms of the virus. One was last on-site Sept. 2, and the other has been extended leave, according to WIPP management contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership.
Altogether, WIPP has recorded 36 positive cases, and 14 of those have recovered.
The Savannah River Site, which has extensive operations for both the Environmental Management office and DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, said Friday it has logged a total of 512 confirmed cases and of that number 471 have gotten better received clearance to resume their work.
The number of infections for SRS’s 11,000-member workforce is up 24 from the prior week’s total of 488 cases.
After going to bare bones operation at most of its 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project remediation sites between mid-March and late-May, EM launched a four-step program for ramping up on-site operations. It begins with Phase 0, which is preplanning, and gradually advances to Phase 3, which is a return to roughly pre-pandemic work levels.
No sites are yet in Phase 3. The Uranium Mill Tailings Remediation Action (UMTRA) project in Moab, Utah, is a special case in that it never demobilized below what would now be considered Phase 2. It is located in a rural area and most of its employees are heavy equipment operators.
Sites in Phase 2 are Hanford, the Idaho National Laboratory, the Nevada National Security Site, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, Portsmouth, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
Other sites are in Phase 1.
Some states where EM operations are based, including Ohio, Kentucky, and New Mexico, required anyone traveling to other states considered hot spots self-quarantine for 14 days upon their return. Ohio, for example, urges such isolation for anyone venturing to states with an infection rate of 15% or above. As of Wednesday, these states were South Dakota (16.9), Idaho (16.4%), Alabama (16.2%) and Mississippi (15.8%).
As of Thursday night an online tracking service using data from state and federal health agencies said the United States has recorded almost 6.7 million cases and 197,000 fatalities.
