Attrition From COVID Mandate at SRNS Will be ‘Small,’ Local Fed Tells Advisory Board

The top federal manager at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina said COVID-19 infection rates are falling around the complex near the Georgia line.

“The good news is for the first time in some time we have no one in the hospital,” Michael Budney, manager of the DOE Office of Environmental Management operations office at the property, told a Monday meeting of the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board.

The site, which employs about 11,000 people, has suffered several employee deaths since the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading in the United States in early 2020, Budney said.

Without getting into specifics, Budney said he expects a “very small” number of federal employees at Savannah River to retire rather than comply with a mandate to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by later this month. He did not mention litigation brought against operations contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions by 90 employees refusing to take the vaccine. Contractors have until Jan. 4 to get inoculated against the virus.

Speaking of the Fluor-led management and operations contractor, Budney said at some point, DOE will announce a contract extension for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions. A vice president for the contractor team, Wyatt Clark, said a quarter of the company’s 5,500-member workforce is telecommuting these days.

“A lot of people had the option to touch the retirement button” due to mandates, Clark said in his presentation, “and they chose to stay with us.” In addition, the operations contractor hired 526 new employees in the past year, he added.

The agency announced last week it is indefinitely delaying the final request for proposals for a new operations contract while it evaluates the expanding role of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at Savannah River.