Nearly all staff members at the nation’s top nuclear power regulator have been vaccinated against COVID-19, a spokesperson said this week.
2,684 of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 2,836 employees, around 95%, are fully vaxxed as of Wednesday, an agency spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor via email.NRC doesn’t track booster shots and isn’t required to, the spokesperson said.
The commission is still waiting on the Joe Biden administration to provide more guidance on how it should handle vaccine exemption requests. NRC still hasn’t heard from the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force — the White House team overseeing the federal vaccine mandate — about the next steps, the spokesperson said Wednesday.
In an October all-hands meeting, NRC Executive Director of Operations Daniel Dorman said that there had been “some uncertainty” about the agency’s guidelines for staff seeking religious or medical exemptions to the vaccine mandate. Rules for medical exemptions were close to being done, but there was still “work to be done” on religious exemption guidance, Dorman said at the time.
On Dec. 7, a federal judge in Georgia blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors, but that injunction does not affect the civil service workforce.
Meanwhile, NRC has said that there are “no immediate plans” to change staff’s hybrid work model at its Rockville, Md. headquarters, four regional offices and technical training center. An agency spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor Nov. 15 that most employees work in-person around two days a week.
