An employee at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee died last week from COVID-19, as confirmed cases of the disease across the Department of Energy’s active nulcear-weapons complex again shot up by double digits.
The Y-12 worker “reportedly contracted the virus from a contact outside of work,” a spokesperson for DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) wrote Friday in an email. The spokesperson would not identify the worker, or say what sort of work the employee did at the nation’s manufacturing hub for nuclear-weapon secondary stages.
Across the NNSA’s network of sites, production plants and labs, there were 26 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed as of Friday, compared with last week. That makes for a total of 95 active cases across the enterprise, and a total of 191 recorded at weapons sites since the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus 2019 hit the U.S. in January.
This is the second straight week that the NNSA has confirmed more than 20 new COVID-19 cases. Case numbers are soaring nationwide, as businesses remain mostly open and people in many states carry on with many of their usual summer routines and gatherings.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., each now have 30 confirmed cases, spokespersons said Friday. That’s an increase of 10 week to week for Livermore, and an increase of 15 over the past two weeks for Los Alamos.
The Sandia National Laboratories had 26 cases, with 21 in Albuquerque, N.M., and five in the Livermore, Calif., satellite campus, a lab spokesperson said Friday. That’s up from 24 cases confirmed in the lab network last week: 20 in Albuquerque and four in Livermore.
At all of the weapons labs, more than half the workforce is working from home.
All three of the NNSA’s main weapons production sites, the Kansas City National Security Campus in Missouri, the Pantex Plant weapons service center in Amarillo, Texas, and Y-12, remained at normal operations with maximum telework: a term used by NNSA headquarters to signal that both weapons workers and support-services personnel are allowed on site — but that anyone who is able to telework should be allowed to do so.
The agency has not said how the response to COVID-19, which includes two-week quarantines for anyone who tests positive, displays symptoms, or might have come into contact with someone who was sick, has affected productivity. The agency has completed some minor alterations and scheduled weapon servicing during the pandemic response, but larger milestones loom in 2021 and 2022, when the NNSA is scheduled to finish the first production units of the W88 Alt-370 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead and B61-12 gravity bomb, respectively.
Y-12 this week said it ceased making B61-12 canned subassemblies — secondary stages — for several weeks in April and May, when the site partially idled in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. The facility said the program overall is still on schedule.