Full security training for the nation’s commercial reactors probably won’t resume “until sometime next year,” said Shana Helton, acting deputy director for the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Helton spoke Tuesday at a staff briefing for NRC commissioners about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The NRC has granted numerous exemptions to reactor corporations conducting full-fledged security drills and training because of concerns about social distancing during various exercises. That includes 13 such exemptions granted in the past few weeks to allow facilities some slack in fully staffing mandatory security exercises.
The NRC has not yet developed criteria for deciding when and how to crank up security training back to pre-COVID-19 levels, Helton said, and very few of the commission’s anti-COVID-19 measures have changed since July.
As of Tuesday, 94% of the agency’s roughly 3,000 full-time employees were telecommuting, about the same as in late July. That is down from 95% at the beginning of July and 98% in March.
The agency started Phase 1 of its re-mobilization strategy on June 15, which enabled workers to voluntarily return to their job sites. On June 21, staff shifted from mandatory telework to maximum telework, which enabled them to continue working outside the office at their discretion. Phase 1 requires employees’ temperatures to be checked by other staffers as they enter the NRC offices.
Phase 2, which allows more workers to return to offices, began July 12 at NRC headquarters, and at Pennsylvania-based Region I and Illinois-based Region III. In Phase 2, employees can monitor their own temperatures.
Three other NRC locations, Georgia-based Region II, Texas-based Region IV, and the Technical Training Center in Chattanooga, Tenn., remained in Phase 1 as of Tuesday, Helton said.
It was not clear at deadline when, or under which conditions, NRC locations might loosen operational restrictions beyond the limits of Phase 2.
