Harsh winter weather this week in the Southwest and West scrambled work schedules at a couple of nuclear sites around the Department of Energy’s weapons complex.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was closed on Tuesday due to snow and wintry weather and the federal complex also had a delayed opening on Wednesday, a DOE spokesperson said via email Friday. “Everything is back to normal now.”
A similar situation was found further west as non-essential workers in many areas around the Hanford Site in Washington stayed home Monday due to adverse weather, according to an advisory posted on an operations website run by a contractor.
The stay-home advisory applied to non-essential day shift workers north and south of the Wye Barricade, including Richland, according to the notice. That was the only day, however, when the snowy, icy weather actually resulted in a stay-home notice, said a DOE spokesperson at Hanford.
Most of the weather headlines this week, however, revolved around Texas where an extreme winter storm overwhelmed much of the state’s power grid causing blackouts and emergency conditions across much of the Lone Star state.
But a commercially-owned nuclear waste disposal site in West Texas managed to muddle through without significant disruption.
“Despite the challenging weather and power outages that occurred earlier this week, the [Waste Control Specialists] WCS site is operational and safely receiving shipments for disposal at our secure facility,” Waste Control Specialists President and Chief Operating Officer David Carlson said in a statement emailed through a spokesman Friday.
Waste Control Specialists owns a 1,338-acre storage facility in Andrews County, Texas.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said in a mid-day Twitter post Friday that “operations have returned to normal, and we are no longer asking for energy conservation. Thanks for helping the grid during this very difficult time.”
