More than 90% of the workers for CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley were vaccinated prior to a Dec. 8 deadline set by the contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project site in New York state, deputy general manager Kelly Wooley told an online Citizen Task Force meeting Wednesday night.
As a result, federal court orders staying the vaccination mandate have little impact at West Valley, Wooley said.
David Bowen, the head of the nuclear waste program at the Washington Department of Ecology, is seeking to fill 20 vacancies, which represents a quarter of the workforce for the state regulator for the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, he told the Hanford Advisory Board Wednesday.
Most of the vacancies should be filled within the next few weeks, Bowen said, adding the staffing gaps have not hurt Hanford oversight to date.
Probably six of the 20 openings were vaccine-mandate related, Bowen said.
The Department of Energy’s $7.5-billion nuclear cleanup office is affected by the reduced number of industry contractors stemming from the gradual decline in the number of operating nuclear power plants in the United States, the top boss at Office of Environmental Management told an online meeting Tuesday.
The number of domestic nuclear suppliers “is not what it used to be,” Environmental Management Senior Adviser William (Ike) White told an online meeting of the Environmental Management Advisory Board chairs.
White’s comment on nuclear service providers grew out of a board chair’s question on problems with nuclear construction at federal sites such as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. There DOE’s prime contractor for WIPP ended up replacing the subcontractor it hired to build a new, mission-critical underground ventilation system. WIPP is a tricky situation because it is a nuclear site and an underground mining site, White said.
Also, “things sometimes just don’t work out,” White said.
There was “no impact” to Department of Environmental Management sites in Kentucky and Tennessee after a rash of unusual late-autumn tornados wrought death and destruction across the middle of the country over the weekend.
“Thankfully, no impact to our EM sites,” a spokesperson for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) wrote Monday morning in an email when asked over the weekend whether there had been damage, injuries or disruption at agency sites in Paducah, Ky., Lexington, Ky., Oak Ridge, Tenn., or elsewhere.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday 88 deaths are confirmed so far, with over 70 in Kentucky, from the twisters that ripped through parts of six states.
