The Department of Energy’s three nuclear weapons laboratories had all widely expanded teleworking Friday due to COVID-19, with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California taking drastic measures as its host county went into lockdown.
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.
Livermore started transitioning this week to minimum safe operations and plans to finish by Monday. Minimum safe operations will continue through at least April 7, according to the lab’s website.
“Only those involved in Minimum Safe Operations, identified mission-critical activities or employees retrieving telecommuting equipment should be on site during this time,” Livermore wrote on its website.
For mission-essential employees who cannot be more than six feet away from one another while working — a personal bubble said by the federal government to limit the chances of contracting the illness from someone else — the lab will provide N95 masks and gloves.
Livermore acknowledged a reported employee exposure earlier this month, though that individual later tested negative for infection.
One employee at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C., has tested positive for COVID-19, but the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) weapon sites had yet to log a confirmed case as of deadline Friday.
NNSA headquarters has repeatedly declined to say whether any member of the nuclear weapons workforce has reported suspected exposure to the novel coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan, China, in 2019. As of Friday, there were more than 15,000 confirmed infections in the United States, and 201 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
