“We do pretty high-hazard work in the complex, and we found it very interesting that folks who would climb into a reactor vessel or be moving fuel, or out in the DOE complex would be opening canisters to do repackaging — which is at some level pretty risky — were extremely nervous and extremely concerned with respect to COVID[-19]. And our belief grew, from those engagements, to really become rooted in the fact that this is different. Because unlike those challenges and risks that we all encounter and deal with, you can actually take this home. So what we decided pretty quickly was that we actually weren’t only communicating with our employees, we were actually communicating with our employees’ families about why it was safe to let their family member come back to work.”
—Michael Lempke, President, Nuclear and Environmental Group at Huntington Ingalls Industries (former associate principal deputy administrator, deputy chief operating officer, National Nuclear Security Administration, 2012-14).
(Lempke spoke Wednesday in a webcast hosted by the Energy Facility Contractors Group. Lempke is the chair of that group’s board of directors.)
