With top managers stressing the need to remain vigilant, the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management had 101 confirmed active cases of COVID-19 within the past week, continuing a downward trend that started in late January.
The figure, shared via email Thursday by an Environmental Management (EM) spokesperson, reflects a sizable drop from the 139 recorded last week and the 180 from two weeks ago. Only three weeks ago, the weekly figure was 232.
It was one year ago this week that the nation largely started to shut down due to growing concern over the coronavirus. Large spectator sporting events were cancelled and plane travel into the United States was restricted. Nuclear cleanup sites were restricted also to critical operations.
As of Friday morning, there were 24 employees at Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina quarantined with COVID-19, according to data posted by a DOE contractor for the site. That’s down from the 43 in quarantine a week ago.
So far, about 300 SRS workers and their spouses have received vaccine shots under a deal reached Feb. 20 with a firm called Rural Health, a DOE spokesperson in South Carolina said in a Thursday email. The provider was retained to give shots to those at the complex who meet current eligibility requirements in the state, meaning being age 65-plus or meeting certain other criteria. There are roughly 11,000 federal employees and contractors at the facility adjacent to the Georgia border.
Savannah River has been approved by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control “as a closed vaccination point, however, we have not received any vaccines yet,” the SRS spokesperson said.
“Our employees have also been taking advantage of other off-site vaccine opportunities,” although the DOE does not have all the data yet on off-site vaccinations. The spokesperson estimated probably 60% of SRS firefighters and other first responders have been vaccinated, so far.
With vaccine distribution plans largely overseen by the states, and typically starting with the oldest and most ill, data on shots administered to DOE cleanup workers is mostly anecdotal at this point. Other sources around the complex have indicated many firefighters and first responders at the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Portsmouth Site in Ohio have been vaccinated.
President Joe Biden said in a national television address Thursday night he is directing states to make all adults, age 18 and up, eligible for vaccination effective May 1. Biden added, however, this does not mean everyone can be vaccinated by then due to the slow rollout of supplies.
Todd Shrader, deputy assistant secretary for EM, would not speculate on when enough cleanup workers will be vaccinated to resume normal operations at DOE nuclear properties.
“DOE is not a vaccine distributor,” Shrader said in response to a question at this week’s online Waste Management Symposia. The agency and its contractors will rely upon local health organizations for COVID-19 vaccinations, he added
Meanwhile, Huntington Ingalls Industries, the parent company for Newport News Nuclear, has vaccinated 3,400 employees out of its total 43,000-member workforce, “so there is plenty more to go,” Michael Lempke, the president of the company’s nuclear and environmental services group said Thursday.
In an online conversation with Weapons Complex Monitor and others, Lempke would not hazard a guess on when its legacy cleanup venture, Newport News Nuclear-BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) would be able to return to full operations at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. That will be worked out at some point between N3B and federal and state officials, he said.
A full year into the pandemic, DOE EM, like the rest of the country, thinks a little more about what it takes to make a continent-sprawling enterprise with powerful local leadership snap to and pull together during a moment of global crisis.
For example, the entire Office of Environmental Management conducted a COVID safety pause or stand-down March 3, Nicole Nelson-Jean, associate principal deputy assistant secretary for field operation said, during a panel discussion at Waste Management. The session was conducted via Zoom and was evidently held across DOE.
DOE also is not soft-pedaling its stance on the COVID vaccine.
“We are encouraging the workforce to get the COVID vaccine when it is available” to them, Nelson-Jean said.
Out in the weapons complex, there were five new confirmed positive tests reported to managers at the Hanford Site this week, according to advisories posted on a DOE Hanford website run by a contractor. That is the same number of new confirmed positive cases as last week at the former plutonium production complex.
Elsewhere, DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico only had one new case between March 3 and March 10, according to a Thursday Facebook post by the site’s prime contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership. Early last fall, the weekly confirmed cases was hitting about 20 for the deep-underground transuranic-waste disposal site.
“Like many of you, I’m optimistic we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I want to encourage all of you this morning to remain vigilant in implementing the controls and protocols that have served us well the past year,” William (Ike) White, acting assistant secretary of environmental management, said during the online conference.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, there have been about 29.3 million cases in the United States resulting in nearly 531,000 deaths, according to an online tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
