Managers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state learned Tuesday that three more workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to a post on the property’s emergency operations website.
That brings the unofficial total of COVID-19 cases at Hanford to 195 so far in 2020. That is based on a public update provided to the Hanford Advisory Board last month by the DOE site’s manager, Brian Vance, combined with daily updates on the website.
The website, operated by landlord services contractor Mission Support Alliance, provides daily bulletins on COVID-19 testing, new infections, and buildings being disinfected at the former plutonium production complex.
Across the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) complex of Cold War and Manhattan Project nuclear sites, there were 109 “active” cases as of last Thursday, according to an EM spokesperson. The EM office does not release the number of total cases logged so far this year. The 109 active cases represent a big jump from the 80 reported the previous week.
Hanford has roughly 11,000 contract workers and federal employees, roughly the same as the Savannah River Site which last Friday reported a total of 619 cases so far in 2020. While Hanford is an EM-only site, Savannah River is home to extensive operations for both the nuclear cleanup office and the DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
As of early Wednesday morning, the United States has recorded nearly 9.5 million cases and 233,000 deaths as a result of the virus. That is according to a dashboard website curated by The New York Times and Google.
