The Deartment of Energy’s nuclear-weapon sites are starting to track the financial effects of reordering day-to-day operations amid the worsening COVID-19 outbreak, even as weapons-production continues and restrictions increase.
“Due to state, local and national work restriction orders, NNSA [the National Nuclear Security Administration] has asked us to track expenses related to COVID-19,” the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico said in a post dated Thursday.
About a third of the labs’ workforce of 14,000 started teleworking last week as part of the national effort to eliminate most inessential gathering of people in all walks of life. Among the mundane, but important, adjustments during the transition is how to account for time spent working at home.
Sandia employees will cope, on top of everything else, with redoing their timesheets from the week starting March 13, according to the Albuquerque-based labs’ website. The codes workers use to account for COVID-19-related expenses have changed since telework started, and could change again.
Meanwhile, as they did last week, nuclear weapons production facilities are still calling in all of their workforce.
A phone message posted Sunday to the Kansas City National Security Campus’ phone directory said the plant, which makes the non-nuclear parts of nuclear weapons, was deemed “an essential government function” and that “operations are not impacted by the recently announced 30-day stay at home order for Kansas City are residents.”
Likewise, the main phone switchboard and website for the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, the sole U.S. assembly and maintenance hub for nuclear weapons, said workers are to report for their shifts as normal.
As of Friday, a few Pantex employees who returned recently from international travel were in quarantine. None of them reported any definitive exposure to COVID-19, a spokesperson for plant operator Consolidated Nuclear Security said Friday. The company also manages the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and said the nation’s weapon-uranium center was still open for business, going into the weekend.
Meanwhile, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California planned by the end of the day to complete its transition to minimum safe operations, restricting on-site work to those involved with “identified mission-critical activities.” The lab is in charge of the W80-4 and W87-1 warhead modernization projects, which will head into the production pipeline once another two weapons, the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb and W88 Alt-370 submarine launched ballistic missile, roll out. The transition at the production sites is supposed to start by the middle of this decade.
As Livermore rolls into a near-lockdown, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is also tightening its response to COVID-19. According to guidelines from Director Thomas Mason, any lab employees returning from travel outside New Mexico must now self-quarantine for 14 days, whether symptomatic or not.
There were more than 35,000 COVID-19 cases in the U.S. as of Monday morning, according to a tracker maintained by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. There were more than 470 deaths attributed to the disease at deadline Monday. The confirmed U.S. death toll for the disease has now increased by a factor of 10 in less than a month.
