Concerns about the surging COVID-19 pandemic in New Mexico led the Department of Energy to reduce on-site staffing and slow certain operations at both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, according to recent documents published by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
At Los Alamos, operations are affected for both the National Nuclear Security Administration’s lab-management contractor, Triad National Security, and DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) cleanup contractor Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B). Triad’s onsite staffing is at “an absolute minimum” following Thanksgiving, according to a Nov. 27 defense board report. A lab spokesperson said only about 20% of the workforce was inside the fence this week.
In late-November, transuranic waste work at Los Alamos Area G was suspended while key staff self-isolated due to a presumptive case of COVID-19, the defense board’s wrote in another recent report on Los Alamos.
Triad and N3B reached an agreement Nov. 24 to allow the legacy contractor to use Triad’s on-site COVID-19 testing program, a Triad spokesman said by email Friday. The lab-management contractor has required random screenings for its own employees for months but did not administer tests to personnel working for the EM contractor.
Los Alamos National Laboratory confirmed 383 cases of coronavirus infection as of Dec. 6, according to N3B “town hall” briefing papers obtained by Weapons Complex Monitor. Triad accounted for 351 of those cases, N3B for 27 and federal National Nuclear Security Administration staff for five. Triad cases had risen to 457, as of Friday, a spokesperson said.
As for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, COVID-19 has prompted the site to cut back to minimum operations for the short term and receive only two shipments a week for the rest of the calendar year, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board reported this month. That figure is down from the five shipments per week the facility managed for most of the pandemic.
Management at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant was notified of seven positive tests for COVID-19 between Dec 9 and Dec. 15, prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership said this week on Twitter. Of those seven, six work for the prime and one for the subcontractor. Through Tuesday, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant had recorded 168 confirmed positive cases, with 151 recoveries.
As of Friday, the entire state of New Mexico had 126,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and about 2,100 deaths stemming from the illness, according to the New Mexico Department of Health.
Meanwhile, at EM’s biggest cleanup, the Hanford Site in Washington state, there were 33 new confirmed cases of the coronavirus over the past week, putting the site’s cumulative case count at more than 520 since the pandemic hit the U.S. in January.
Confirmation of the recent positive tests at Hanford were spread out between late Friday Dec. 11 and this past Wednesday, according to updates posted on a DOE emergency operations website run by Hanford site services contractor Mission Support Alliance.
The weekly total is in addition to the 489 already confirmed by a DOE Office of Environmental Management spokesperson for Hanford last week.
On the other side of the country, there were as of Friday morning 159 Savannah River Site employees currently quarantined with COVID-19, which is 28 more than the 131 reported a week ago.
Across the entire Office of Environmental Management workforce, there were 366 active cases of COVID-19 as of Thursday, an EM spokesperson said in an email.
This week’s total marks the second highest number of active infections in a seven-day period for EM in 2020, eclipsed only by the 477 recorded the week of Dec. 10. This week’s total was almost double the 194 confirmed, active cases acknowledged by EM in early November.
The EM spokesperson said last week that the 16 nuclear cleanup sites overseen by the Office of Environmental Management had recorded over 2,000 cases in 2020.
As of Thursday evening, the United States had as of Friday confirmed roughly 17 million cases of COVID-19 and 309,000 deaths, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
EM scaled back work at most of the sites to skeleton staff levels more a two month period during the spring between mid-March and late May.
As of Friday, no EM site had advanced to the fourth and final phase of EM’s reopening plan, Phase 3, which would mark a return to essentially pre-pandemic operations, the EM spokesperson said Thursday. That has been the case since the end of August.