As the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons laboratories conduct mass teleworking amid the COVID-19 pandemic, production sites with work already in the pipeline are still chugging along at about full staff while trying to protect their workforces.
At the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for example, construction continues on the Uranium Processing Facility, and most of the workforce is still showing up to the site each day.
The story was much the same at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, the nation’s sole nuclear-weapons assembly-disassembly hub. As of Wednesday, all three shifts at Pantex were to report for work as usual.
Both Y-12 and Pantex are managed by the Bechtel National-led Consolidated Nuclear Security. A spokesperson for the contractor said that, so far, “operations at both plants are not affected by the response to COVID-19.”
There are about 4,500 employees at Y-12, which includes construction workers to build the Uranium Processing Facility, and more than 3,000 employees at Pantex.
“[W]e are taking appropriate precautions, including increased sanitation efforts, limiting travel and visits, minimizing external visitors, and increasing the use of technology to limit face-to-face contact” at the sites, the CNS spokesperson said.
Likewise, it was business as usual Wednesday at the Honeywell-managed Kansas City National Security Complex, which manufactures the non-nuclear parts of nuclear weapons. There have been no disruptions to operations so far because of COVID-19, a spokesperson wrote in an email.
To help limit the spread of the viral disease at Kansas City, the site has been “increasing cleaning protocols, reducing non-essential travel and large meetings, and working with suppliers to identify potential impacts to the supply chain,” a spokesperson for management and operations contractor Honeywell Federal Manufacturing Technologies said Wednesday.
Kansas City employs about 4,000 people, according to Honeywell.
Meanwhile, the three nuclear weapons laboratories had all widely expanded teleworking at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
After lagging behind the other two labs, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico said Tuesday it had implemented a “a liberal work from home policy” for its nearly 13,000 employees.
The Sandia National Laboratories down the road in Albuquerque, N.M. put a telework order in place earlier this week, and around 4,000 members of its roughly 14,000-person workforce were working remotely at deadline.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California on Monday started transitioning to minimum safe operations Tuesday and plans to finish by next Monday, March 23. Minimum safe operations will continue through April 7, according to the lab’s website.
Energy Department headquarters said this week that there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 within its workforce, although whether the declaration covers both federal employees and contractors is not clear.
Livermore acknowledged a reported employee exposure earlier this month, though that individual later tested negative for infection. However, representatives of all other NNSA laboratories, production sites, and the Nevada National Security Site have declined, multiple times, to say whether any member of their workforce has reported exposure to the novel coronavirus 2019.
