The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina already has about 65% of staff back working inside the fence, the top manager there said Friday.
Mike Budney, manager of DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) operations at Savannah River made the comments during his presentation to the South Carolina Nuclear Advisory Council.
“That’s a little higher than you might see at some other places in Phase 1” of the DOE restart program designed to increase operations to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels nuclear sites, Budney said. Savannah River has been in Phase 1 since June.
The Hanford Site in Washington state is in Phase 2 but has 60% of its people back onsite, officials there have said recently.
Like other DOE sites, Savannah River dramatically scaled back its on-site staffing in March to slow the spread of COVID-19. In late May, Savannah River and other nuclear properties began bringing more people back on site. The 310-square-mile complex has about 11,000 federal and contractor employees including operations for EM and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
Savannah River has more people in Phase 1 largely because it has more operations that could not simply be left alone, Budney said. The DOE restart program begins with Phase 0 preplanning and is designed to culminate in Phase 3, which could approximate pre-pandemic work levels.
The Savannah River Site had recorded a total of 591 cases as of last Friday and Budney cannot predict when it will enter Phase 2 in part because of the rate of infections within the eight counties, three of them in Georgia, which provide the complex with 95% of its workers. The site is typically seeing between 14 and 18 new cases each week, he added. Last week’s total was 22.
Meanwhile the DOE’s Hanford Site had another employee report testing positive for the coronavirus on Sunday, according to an emergency operations website. Hanford has recorded about 179 cases so far in 2020. That’s based on a recent statement from the Hanford Site’s manager, Brian Vance, and updates on the website.
