The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management logged 21 confirmed cases of COVID-19 during the past week, a decrease of 14 from the prior week’s total of 35, a spokesperson for the organization said Thursday by email.
Two weeks ago the weekly confirmed number was 43, a fraction of the high of 775 for the cleanup branch recorded during the first week of February as the omicron variant was surging across the United States.
The DOE nuclear cleanup spokesperson said all of DOE has changed how COVID cases are counted. Only those cases that are potentially work-related, or affect onsite in some way, need to be reported. DOE made the change in case accounting in March, the spokesperson said.
“DOE remains concerned about all employees who contract COVID-19” and continues to follow federal guidelines for quarantine and isolation, the spokesperson said. “With over 98% of the workforce vaccinated, the impacts to employees are not as severe.”
The National Nuclear Security Administration recently stopped counting cases among teleworkers. Environmental Management, like other branches of DOE, was as of last month no longer maximizing telework.
The Environmental Management spokesperson could not provide any figures on how many nuclear cleanup employees are back at their pre-pandemic work stations. But “from anecdotal evidence we are seeing more people on video calls from their offices instead of home,” the spokesperson said.
Minority-serving institutions now have until April 8 to file expressions of interest with the contractor running the Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, according to a procurement update Tuesday.
The prior deadline was March 25 for Minority Serving Institutions, as defined by the Department of Education, to respond to the initial sources sought March 11 notice from Battelle Savannah River Alliance, which operates the national laboratory for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
These colleges and universities with high percentages of minority students are invited to file expressions of interest to assist the laboratory with research for the Environmental Management office’s nuclear-weapons cleanup mission. It is part of the DOE nuclear remediation branch’s ongoing efforts to diversify its mostly-white staff and supplier base.
Eligible institutions that send a letter of interest will receive a request for proposals, according to DOE. The primary point of contact is procurement representative Ellen Harrison, [email protected].
In February 2021 Battelle Savannah River Alliance started its five-year, $3.8-billion contract to manage the laboratory, an assignment previously carried out by Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the prime for the entire Savannah River Site. Along with Battelle, the Battelle Savannah River Alliance counts five regional universities among its members, including South Carolina State, a historically black public university in Orangeburg, S.C.
Final solicitations for major new Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management contracts for the Portsmouth and Paducah Sites could be on the street by the end of this month, the agency said in a Wednesday notice.
April is the earliest DOE will release the final request for proposals (RFPs) for the $5.87-billion Decontamination and Decommissioning Contract at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the $1.89-billion Portsmouth Paducah Project Office (PPPO) Operations and Site Mission Support Contract, the agency said in the quarterly procurement update. Draft RFPs were released in January.
The procurement director for the Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center, Aaron Deckard, said last month at the Waste Management Symposia he anticipates a May release for both the next Portsmouth cleanup contract in Ohio and the follow-on to the contract formerly known as Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride (DUF6) Conversion. The new DUF6 contract for facilities in both Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky was expanded to include other environmental work in addition to running the conversion facilities.
Fluor-BWXT holds the current Portsmouth decommissioning contract, which started in March 2011, is set to run through March 2023 and is worth about $4.4 billion. Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services is the incumbent on running the depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) facilities with a $703-million contract that started in February 2017 and is set to run through March 2023.
Cleanup crews at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory have finished retrieving buried waste from an almost six-acre site at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex, a milestone the agency celebrated during a ceremony Wednesday, DOE said in a press release.
Eventually the cleanup contractor, Jacobs-led Idaho Environmental Coalition, will also take down the soft-sided buildings at the 5.69-acre site for the Accelerated Retrieval Project. The smaller site is within the Subsurface Disposal Area, a 97-acre landfill.
Remediation is occurring in accordance with a 2008 agreement between DOE, the state and the Environmental Protection Agency. It is part of an effort to dig up, repackage and ship out of state contaminated waste that includes sludges, roasted uranium fines and plutonium filters buried in shallow ground at the Idaho site between 1952 and 1970, DOE said in the release.
The Accelerated Retrieval Project officially started in early 2005 and over time, crews have removed more than 49,500 drums of waste for the Subsurface Disposal area in an effort to protect Snake River Plain Aquifer.
In addition to top executives from the DOE Office of Environmental Management, Idaho Gov. Brad Little, Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, Idaho lawmakers and others attended the ceremony Wednesday to celebrate the milestone.
“Thank you for your dedication, expertise and professionalism,” Environmental Management senior adviser William (Ike) White said in the press release. “And most importantly, thank you for protecting the environment and closing this chapter on the Cold War.”
