As of this morning, the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina has confirmed a total of 609 cases of COVID-19 among its roughly 11,000-member workforce.
The numbers, posted online by the Aiken, S.C., site, represent a rise of 18 cases from the prior week’s total of 591. Also, 568 of those employees have recovered and been cleared to return to work.
In addition to EM, the DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration has some existing operations at the site adjacent to the Georgia border, and is building a new plutonium pit-production facility there.
Meanwhile, total cases at the 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project cleanup sites run by EM are also up this week. There are currently 99 active COVID cases in the EM complex this week, a spokesperson for the nuclear remediation office said in a Thursday email. That is up from the 80 active cases reported by EM last week. Two weeks ago, the cleanup office reported 61 active cases.
Meanwhile the Hanford Site in Washington state, DOE’s largest legacy nuclear-weapons cleanup site, had two more employee report testing positive for the coronavirus this week, according to an emergency operations website. Hanford has recorded about 180 cases so far in 2020. That’s based on a statement earlier this month from the Hanford Site’s manager, Brian Vance, and updates on the website.
The counties surrounding these two major EM sites appear to have a significant number of COVID-19 infections. The Washington state Department of Health virus dashboard indicates Benton County has as of this week recorded 5,085 cases and 134 deaths while Franklin County has 4,717 cases and 67 deaths.
Aiken County, S.C., home to the Savannah River Site, has an incident rate of 172 per 100,000 and a total case count of about 4,860, according to the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Conservation dashboard site. Likewise, neighboring Barnwell County has 858 cases but an incidence rate of 364 per 100,000 people.
Mike Budney, manager of EM operations at Savannah River cannot predict when it will enter Phase 2 of DOE’s remobilization program 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. He made his comments during an Oct. 16 meeting of the South Carolina Nuclear Advisory Council, which happened after the deadline last week for Weapons Complex Monitor.
Savannah River Site is typically seeing between 14 and 18 new cases each week, Budney said. At one point during the summer, the site was experiencing 50-to-60 new cases per week, he added.
There were 18 positive COVID-19 tests reported at WIPP between Oct. 8 and Oct.17, site management and operations contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership said late Tuesday. Thus far, 63 employees at WIPP have tested positive and 36 have recovered and been cleared to return to work, according to the contractor.
To date the United States has reported 8.46 million cases of COVID-19 cases and 223,000 people have died as a result of the illness, according to an online database curated by The New York Times and Google.
Two members of the security detail for Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette tested positive for the virus Oct. 15, a couple of days after the official appeared at a ceremony at DOE’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
A Brouillette spokesperson who announced the positive tests last week via Twitter, did not respond to inquiries as to whether the energy secretary went into self-isolation as a result. However, Brouillette seemed to say he was isolating, when he spoke to an online meeting of the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board meeting Tuesday.
Brouillette, who has tested negative, went on to say that one security staffer was recovering well and the other has not developed symptoms at this time.
Tank Waste Programs Among Most Affected by COVID-19 Delays
Tank waste operations, particularly a project at the Idaho National Laboratory, are hard hit by workplace restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the No. 2 official at EM said Monday.
A year ago, the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) expected the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at Idaho to start hot commissioning in 2020. But that won’t happen until the first half of next year, with full operation delayed to September 2021.
“This plant more than any other, the schedule was impacted by COVID,” said Todd Shrader, the EM principal deputy assistant secretary, during an online meeting of the chairs of the Environmental Management’s Site-Specific Advisory Boards.
The long-delayed IWTU is intended to treat 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing radioactive waste. Initial construction of the plant was largely completed in 2012 by prior contractor CH2M-WG Idaho. In years since then, cleanup contractor Fluor Idaho has re-designed major components and is encouraged by simulant tests in the past year, mostly before the pandemic reduced on-site work at Idaho and other DOE operations in March.
Hot commissioning and operation of the IWTU involves welding and other close quarters work, Shrader said. “Unfortunately, that requires workers to be right up on top of each other,” he added.
Elsewhere in the weapons complex, tank waste operations have been slowed at both the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Shrader said. Savannah River, at least, has been able to recently start hot commissioning of the Salt Waste Processing Facility built by Parsons.
At Hanford, an overnight shift has been added to help compensate for the smaller clusters of workers allowed onsite due to pandemic social distancing requirements, Shrader said.
Projects that largely involve “moving dirt” have been barely affected, Shrader said, pointing to the Uranium Mill Tailings Remediation Action Project in Moab, Utah. Shrader’s comments came after one of the board chairs asked the No. 2 EM official to try and quantify delays brought about by the novel coronavirus.
