As of mid-week, there had been a total of 175 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, Hanford Site Manager Brian Vance said Wednesday during a webcast advisory board meeting.
Vance, the Hanford site manager, provided the number in response to a question from a member of the Hanford Advisory Board: a DOE-chartered stakeholders group that provides community feedback about activity at the agency’s largest and most expensive nuclear-weapons cleanup site.
As of Wednesday morning, there had been 175 confirmed cases of COVID-19, 596 negative tests have been returned and site management is currently awaiting the results of 73 tests, Vance said.
Spokespersons with the DOE Office of Environmental Management have thus far declined to reveal specifics about the total number of infections at the former plutonium production site, aside from cases noted occasionally on a DOE Hanford advisory website which alerts the 11,000 federal and contract workers at Hanford about access to various facilities that are being disinfected to reduce risk of exposure to the virus.
When there are positive cases, DOE performs contact tracing “to the borders of the site and then we turn over to the counties,” of Benton and Franklin, Vance said. In response to a board question, Vance said contact tracing is important, and seemed to suggest contractors, who employ most people at the site, bear the chief responsibility for convincing workers to report potential COVID-19 exposures to health officials at Hanford. It is an issue to be taken up “with the employers,” Vance said.
The Hanford manager said his impression is that DOE contractors are heavily stressing protocols for reporting potential employee exposure to the novel coronavirus.
The two most recent COVID-19 infections were disclosed late Monday in a post on a website overseen by Hanford’s emergency operations center and operated by contractor Mission Support Alliance.
There are currently 61 active COVID-19 cases in the DOE Office of Environmental Management complex, a spokesperson for that office said via email Thursday. That is down 10 from the previous week when there were 74. The Environmental Management office does not disclose the total number of infections confirmed since the pandemic began.
The Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which houses extensive operations for both the nuclear cleanup office and DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration said Friday it has logged 569 cases in 2020, up 24 from the prior week total of 545 cases. Thus far 533 individuals within the 11,000-member Savannah River workforce have recovered and received clearance to resume working.
The Savannah River Site remains in Phase 1 of the DOE restart program to gradually return to pre-pandemic level operations after cutting back to bare bones on-site staffing for about two months this spring. The department is trying to slow the spread of the virus that has killed 213,000 nationally and infected more than 7.6 million Americans, including President Donald Trump.
Hanford, which is in Phase 2, the next-to-last-stage in the remobilization program currently has about 60% of its people back onsite and another 40% teleworking. There are no longer any Hanford workers receiving paid leave because they could not telecommute or report back to their on-site work stations, Vance said. Hanford managers worked to ensure there all federal, contractor and subcontractor staffers fit into one of the two categories before fiscal 2020 ended Sept. 30.
In addition to Hanford, other sites now in Phase 2 are the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Idaho National Laboratory, the Nevada National Security Site, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and the Uranium Mill Tailings Removal Action project in Moab, Utah. Moab, a rural site with a workforce with lots of heavy equipment operators is unique in that it never scaled back on-site work as much as the others.
