While the management contractor for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has ordered its employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by this fall, the legacy nuclear cleanup contractor at the site had not, at deadline.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) “encourages vaccinations against COVID-19 among its employees and subcontractors, but at this time, has not made COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory,” an N3B spokesperson said by email Friday. Currently, “approximately 82% of our workforce is fully vaccinated.”
N3B serves as the legacy cleanup contractor at Los Alamos for the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management. It has more than 600 employees at the property, according to published accounts by the Los Alamos Reporter newspaper.
Triad National Security, which runs the lab’s weapons progras for the National Nuclear Security Administration, has given employees until Oct. 15 to get fully vaccinated, a spokesperson for the management and operations contractor said by phone Friday. The Triad requirement does not apply to federal employees at Triad or other contractors at the site, the spokesperson said.
Last week became the first prime contractor within the weapons complex to publicly announce a vaccine mandate for its workforce. Triad employs about 9,400 people at Los Alamos, according to the DOE. About 85% of the Triad workforce have already been inoculated against the virus, according to the prime contractor.
Triad announced the move Monday, Aug. 23, the same day the Food and Drug Administration fully approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for individuals as young as 16. Moderna is also reportedly being considered for full approval by the agency, which until recently had only issued “emergency” authorization for vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
