The top federal manager at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina said COVID-19 infection rates are falling around the complex near the Georgia line.
“The good news is for the first time in some time we have no one in the hospital,” Michael Budney, manager of the DOE Office of Environmental Management operations office at the property, told a Monday meeting of the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board.
The site, which employs about 11,000 people, has suffered several employee deaths since the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading in the United States in early 2020, Budney said.
Without getting into specifics, Budney said he expects a “very small” number of federal employees at Savannah River to retire rather than comply with a mandate to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by later this month. He did not mention litigation brought against operations contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions by 90 employees refusing to take the vaccine. Contractors have until Jan. 4 to get inoculated against the virus.
Speaking of the Fluor-led management and operations contractor, Budney said at some point, DOE will announce a contract extension for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions. A vice president for the contractor team, Wyatt Clark, said a quarter of the company’s 5,500-member workforce is telecommuting these days.
“A lot of people had the option to touch the retirement button” due to mandates, Clark said in his presentation, “and they chose to stay with us.” In addition, the operations contractor hired 526 new employees in the past year, he added.
The agency announced last week it is indefinitely delaying the final request for proposals for a new operations contract while it evaluates the expanding role of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at Savannah River.
On the other hand, the succession of the site’s liquid-waste cleanup contract is proceeding more smoothly.
On Oct. 27, the DOE Office of Environmental Management awarded the potential $21-billion Integrated Mission Contract, including liquid waste management and other remediation, to BWX Technologies-led Savannah River Mission Completion. As of Monday afternoon, no bid protests over the contract have been posted on the Government Accountability Office website.
Barring an extended contract challenge, the South Carolina Department of Health & Environmental Control hopes to negotiate liquid waste management milestones with DOE and the new contractor by the end of fiscal 2022, Susan Fulmer, a manager with the state agency, told the advisory board.
The Monday session marked the first in-person meeting for the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board since the pre-pandemic days of November 2019. The meeting was carried live via YouTube.
