There were 35 confirmed cases of COVID-19 within the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management over the past week, up seven from the prior week’s total of 28, a nuclear cleanup spokesperson said by email Thursday.
The count is down from the 43 confirmed two weeks ago and a far cry from the 775 weekly cases nearly two months ago within the Environmental Management complex, which like the rest of DOE, is returning many people to their pre-pandemic work stations.
More than 100 of Environmental Management federal employees and contract workers have died from COVID-19 over the past two years, Greg Sosson, who heads safety, security and quality assurance for the cleanup branch, told the Nuclear Waste Symposia in Phoenix earlier this month. Nationally, more than 975,000 Americans have died of the virus during the pandemic, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Center.
With the COVID-19 pandemic easing, most of the Washington, D.C. headquarters staff for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is back at the office although employees have the option to continue to telecommute with their manager’s approval, a spokesperson for the agency said in an email.
“The Resident Inspectors were onsite providing oversight during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to provide onsite oversight of DOE/NNSA,” the spokesperson said Friday in reference to inspectors who review safety of nuclear defense facilities for the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
Maximum telework for the DNFSB ended last month.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1988 to monitor the nuclear weapons complex. While it lacks actual enforcement powers, the five board members of the roughly 100-employee DNFSB have the power to make public safety recommendations to the secretary of energy, who must then publicly accept or reject the recommendations.
Hoisting equipment fell and struck the ground just feet from where people were working recently on a new Utility Shift at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., according to a federal safety board’s regular monthly update on the disposal site.
A Nuclear Waste Partnership subcontractor “reported a near miss event when a ten-ton capacity chain-hoist (chain-fall) dropped and impacted the ground approximately fifteen feet from operators working at the shaft,” according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) staff report on Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) activities, dated March 4. Nuclear Waste Partnership is the Amentum-BWX Technologies prime contractor for DOE at WIPP.
“[I]ncompatible equipment” factored into the accident where a nylon sling failed, allowing the chain-fall to drop,” based upon the subcontractor’s initial investigation, the DNFSB report said.
Work on the surface has resumed since the incident, a spokesperson at WIPP said by email Thursday. In August 2019 Harrison Western-Shaft Sinkers, a joint venture between Colorado-based Harrison Western and South African-based Shaft Sinkers, which digs shafts for deep mines, was awarded a $75-million subcontract to build a new utility shaft at WIPP.
New Mexico refused to extend a six-month work authorization when it expired in October 2020 in part because of a local COVID-19 surge. But following a year of administrative proceedings, James Kenney, secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department, approved WIPP’s request to resume digging the shaft that will extend 2,100 feet into the WIPP underground.
