“Many” of the nearly 250 National Nuclear Security Administration employees confirmed to have caught COVID-19 are believed to have been infected while teleworking, the head of the Department of Energy nuclear-weapon agency said Tuesday.
While NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty did not say how many of the confirmed cases involved transmissions outside of an agency site, each such incidence could mean other personnel would not have to miss work while quarantining due to possible exposure.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) had as of last week confirmed a total of 247 cases of COVID-19 among federal employees and contractors across the nuclear weapons enterprise. Of those, 129 were active, a jump of 34 compared with the prior week.
With a workforce of about 50,000 nationwide, Gordon-Hagerty characterized that as a “minimal” rate of infection.
“Our numbers are quite low, in terms of COVID cases,” the NNSA boss said during a virtual meeting of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board. Of the confirmed cases, one was fatal: an employee at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Another 118 NNSA personnel have recovered, the agency said.
Most NNSA employees have been working remotely since mid-March, when the agency curtailed some of its usual operations to slow the spread of the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.
However, those doing nuclear-weapon-production shift work at the Kansas City National Security Complex in Missouri, the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, and the Y-12 National Secutity Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., have all had to show up for work, despite the pandemic. That has also been the case for some people working on top-priority programs at the NNSA national laboratories — such as upgrading facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico needed to cast the fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits.
Gordon-Hagerty and fellow DOE Undersecretaries Paul Dabbar and Mark Menezes, gathered in one room to speak over a video link to the federally chartered advisory committee, members of which tuned in from elsewhere. The DOE managers all appeared to maintain distance from one another during their presentations.
Gordon-Hagerty reaffirmed that the NNSA has “flawlessly” performed its mission during the pandemic response, and that “we have not missed one of our milestones” for completing routine nuclear weapons maintenance and deliveries to and from military services.
Yet more major modernization work looms on the horizon for the NNSA: minting the first productions units of the revamped W88 Alt-370 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead, and the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb in 2021 and 2022, respectively; completing a critical design review to set the cost, schedule and initial design considerations for a new plutonium-pit plant at the Savannah River Site.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Gordon-Hagerty said.
