Those of you who remember the Oak Ridge National Laboratory likely remember for its pivotal role in US history. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory was part of the now infamous Manhattan Project, in which the United States developed the world’s first nuclear bomb. What does not occur to many people is that the site, which is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is still in use. Far from being just a few pages in your high school US history text book the site, in the mountains of East Tennessee is still actively employing a fair number of people. It has even given up a lot of its secrecy, and now has its own website.

On that site Oak Ridge National Laboratory describes itself in the following terms, “ORNL is a multiprogram science and technology laboratory managed for the U.S. Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. ORNL’s mission is to deliver scientific discoveries and technical breakthroughs that will accelerate the development and deployment of solutions in clean energy and global security, and in doing so create economic opportunity for the nation.” The site does also still do some nuclear related research as well.

They will just be doing it with less staff then they used to. The management of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently sent out layoff notices to 10 of their workers. For the time being the company is not disclosing a full list of all of the positions that were cut, but they did say that the jobs were not cut from one specific department. They were cut from multiple departments all over the facility. They did say that the facility made half of the cuts from the support staff, and the other half from the science and technology departments at the facility.

Before you go around and conjure up images of disgruntled scientist, perhaps plotting their nuclear revenge of the employer who dared not to see their genius, or building an army of nano-robots, you may want to think again. Despite the old school science fiction serials plot lines that an event like this may make you lead you to fantasize about the management at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory are actually looking to treat their soon to be displaced workers fairly well.

While the facility did not release any of the details about the packages that are going to be offered to the laid off workers they will be offering a severance package to all 10 of the impacted workers. For the time being the facility is not saying exactly when these layoffs will go into effect. Since the workers were no union and the number of jobs being cut is not enough to qualify as a mass layoff action, under the federal guidelines, there is no reason that they layoffs could not have gone into effect right away. The facility is giving the workers a chance to take other open jobs at the facility, if they are qualified that is, in order to stay employed.

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