Alone among the National Nuclear Security Administration’s major nuclear-weapon sites, only the Los Alamos National Laboratory still requires employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19, according to an Exchange Monitor survey of the site.
The Nevada National Security Site and the Sandia National Laboratories paused enforcement of their mandates in January, the latest to do so following a national injunction in December against the Joe Biden administration’s requirement that federal contractors get vaccinated.
Sandia, through a spokesperson said it had roughly 90% of its workforce vaccinated. The lab’s management and operations contractor, the Honeywell subsidiary National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, had about 12,000 employees, according to a slide briefed by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) defense programs office in the fall of 2021.
A spokesperson for the Nevada National Security Site, managed by the Honeywell-led Mission Support and Test Services, said this week that about 2,000 people at the test site are fully vaccinated. According to the defense programs slide from the fall, which said the operations contractor had about 2,900 employees, that makes for a vaccination rate of roughly 70%.
Meanwhile, the management and operations contractor at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., also still required COVID-19 vaccinations, which the company, the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, said in court papers it is allowed to do, whether the administration requires vaccination or not. The contractor handles some National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) work at the site near the Georgia line, including early work on a planned plutonium pit factory there.
Typically, all of the sites still require employees to wear personal protective equipment, such as masks, and to maintain physical distance when possible to help slow the spread of COVID-19 — an increasingly difficult proposition now that the essentially unchecked omicron variant has become the dominant strain in the U.S., replacing the delta variant that was itself more contagious than the original strain and reportedly more likely to infect even the vaccinated, albeit with mild cases that usually did not result in hospitalization or death.
