The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico on Tuesday followed its sister site, the Lawrence Livermore lab in California, into minimum safe operations amid the worsening the COVID-19 pandemic. As of Tuesday evening, there were no confirmed cases of the viral disease at either facility.
On Monday, Los Alamos posted a memo from Director Thom Mason announcing the operations update. As of Tuesday, the lab is “maintaining minimum safe and secure operations onsite, continuing to support limited, key national security activities that NNSA has deemed mission-essential, and requiring that all other staff telecommute,” according to Mason. “This will immediately and significantly further reduce the number of employees on Laboratory property and we will be monitoring our success in meeting that objective.”
A lab spokesperson declined to discuss additional details regarding what activities are considered mission-essential, and how many on-site personnel they require. Los Alamos has more than 12,500 employees.
The spokesperson specifically declined to say whether construction is continuing at the lab’s Technical Area 55 to support the war-reserve plutonium pit-production mission slated to begin at the Plutonium Facility in 2024. Likewise, the spokesperson would not say whether the Los Alamos workforce remaining on-site would be tested for COVID-19.
On Monday, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham effectively locked down the state, closing nonessential businesses and barring gatherings of more than five people, with rare exceptions.
Livermore has been running at minimum safe operations since Monday. A spokesperson said the California lab is not testing remaining workers on-site for COVID-19. Instead, the facilit is distributing personal protective equipment, practicing lots of hand washing, and keeping areas clean.
“We are asking these employees to stay home if they are ill, or to go home if they are not feeling well,” the Livermore spokesperson wrote in an email Tuesday. “Our Health Services facility is open and available for anyone in need of medical assistance. Any employee who has symptoms consistent with COVID is asked to reach out to their health care provider.”
The Livermore spokesperson would not say how many people are reporting to work during minimum safe operations, or whether the lab is tracking exposure or expected exposure to the disease among its workforce. Livermore has about 7,000 people on-site, during normal operations.
There were more than 55,000 confirmed U.S. cases of COVID-19 at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. Since Sunday, cases have increased at a rate of about 10,000 a day. At deadline, about 800 people had died from the disease, domestically.
Individual cases have been confirmed among the workforce at the Energy Department’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
