There are currently 109 active cases of COVID-19 within the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management cleanup complex, which is 10 more than a week ago, a spokesperson said Thursday.
There appears to be a steady rise in coronavirus infections at the 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project cleanup sites overseen by the Environmental Management (EM) office. There were 80 active cases reported by EM two weeks ago and only 61 three weeks ago. EM logged its increase amid a nationwide autumn surge, and in the same week that the U.S. set, then topped, its record for the number of new infections recorded in a single day.
The EM headquarters spokesperson would not venture a guess as to the reason for the current uptick. But Thursday data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates there have been more than 521,000 new cases reported within the past week. So far in 2020 there have been more than 8.8 million cases of COVID-19 and 227,000 deaths reported in the United States, according to the center’s dashboard.
The Hanford Site in Washington state, EM’s largest and most expensive cleanup operation, has confirmed 12 new cases in the past week. The most recent one was cited Thursday on DOE’s emergency operations website for the former plutonium-production complex.
The unofficial total of coronavirus cases at Hanford so far this year is 192. That’s based on figures shared several weeks ago by DOE’s site manager, Brian Vance, during a public presentation to the Hanford Advisory Board, plus daily COVID-19 updates on the website since then.
A little more than 60% of Hanford’s 11,000 federal and contract staffers are back working inside the fence these days, Vance told a virtual meeting of the Oregon Hanford Cleanup Board on Thursday. The rest are telecommuting, he added.
All of the “non-mobile” workers have been brought back to the site, Vance said. At one point this summer Hanford was using paid leave through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES Act, to pay thousands of people to stay safe at home because their jobs were not suited for remote work, Vance said.
The recent cases at Hanford have had no significant impact on operations, said an EM spokesperson at the site. The cases are dispersed among multiple contractors and locations and include teleworkers who have not been to the site for months, the spokesperson added.
Hanford, like other DOE nuclear complexes, scaled back to minimal operations for about two months this spring while management came up with a plan to operate during the pandemic.
While the Savannah River Site in South Carolina has about the same size workforce and more cases, it has extensive operations for both EM and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. Savannah River is still in Phase 1 of the department’s COVID-19 restart program in part because of the relatively high regional infection rate along the South Carolina-Georgia border, DOE site manager Michael Budney said last week. Hanford is in Phase 2.
The DOE Savannah River Site reported Friday on its emergency operations website that it has now recorded a total of 619 cases of COVID-19 among its workforce. 591 of those employees have recovered and been cleared to return to work. The total number of cases at Savannah River is up 10 from its prior week total of 609, though the site had eight fewer new cases this week than it did last week.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, another DOE site that periodically shares COVID-19 updates, said in a Thursday Twitter post that it is up to 80 cases. The prime contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, said 17 site employees tested positive between Oct. 18 and Oct. 26. The weekly total is relatively flat with the 18 new cases recorded the prior week. About 1,000 people work at the transuranic waste disposal site.
Not all DOE cleanup sites have reported trouble from the pandemic. The West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state, which has less than 1,000 employees saw its last case this summer, according to Kelly Wooley, deputy general manager for cleanup contractor CH2M-BWXT. Wooley spoke to the DOE-charted West Valley Citizens Task Force Wednesday in an online meeting.
