As Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff trickle back into the office, the agency said this week that its current hybrid workplace model doesn’t yet have an expiration date.
“We now are in a posture where most employees are teleworking about three days a week, and they’re in the office on varying days two days a week,” a spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor via phone Monday. “There are no immediate plans to change that.”
NRC allowed more of its staff to start working in-person last week, the agency said in a Tweet Monday. The regulator said that it was “adhering to government-wide vaccine mandates and CDC guidance – and mask mandates for our facility’s locality based on the area’s community transmission rates.”
The hybrid workplace model applies to NRC’s Rockville, Md. headquarters as well as its four regional offices and technical training center, the commission has said.
Meanwhile, NRC is still developing guidelines for processing religious and medical vaccine exemption requests. During an all-hands meeting in October agency operations director Daniel Dorman said that there had been “some uncertainty” surrounding the guidelines but that NRC was close to hammering out the details on its medical exemption procedure.
A spokesperson for the agency told RadWaste Monitor Oct. 22 that it was still waiting on further guidance from the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force — the White House’s vaccine czars — on how to proceed.
