Science key to nuclear labs future says Chu
By Physics Today
August 7, 2009
In the first public meeting of the President’s Council of Advisers in Science and Technology (PCAST), US Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the loss of basic science and technology funding at the nuclear-weapons labs Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore have had an inverse effect in the labs ability to attract "the best and the brightest."
During the 1990s the labs basic research funding was on an “10-year-glide-path” to be cut in half he said, which was only stopped in 1998. "To be blunt," said Chu, "the best and the brightest didn’t want to be weapons designers...they wanted to do good science."
Chu pointed out that this model—of using basic science as the carrot which would eventually lead to an interest in more applied work—has been common at all the major innovation incubators such as the Bell Laboratories or in the weapons labs early history.
How to attract high caliber staff to the weapons labs in the current climate “is an unsolved problem” said Chu, who asked for PCAST to assess ways to attract the best staff to DOE. In the meeting Chu implied that there is currently a review underway of the nuclear weapons management structure.
Chu also expanded on the principles behind his request to Congress to fund centers of excellence in energy research in which DOE would act more like a venture capitalist fund and invest in people, not in individual projects. "In World War II you just picked out outstanding people and gave them a problem and told them to solve it," he said. "They treated problems as triage. You would tackle the hard problem first and move onto the next if it didn't work." A similar attitude needs to exist in energy research he said.
"The key would be the management team and whether they are willing to take on this task," he said. "There are a couple of experiments I want to do in this regard."
Paul Guinnessy
http://blogs.physicstoday.org/politics/2009/08/science-key-to-nuclear-labs-fu.html
13 comments:
Chu had better take action. We are sick of reviews, assessments, compliance and bad management!
How to attract the best and brightest?
1. Dissolve NNSA
2. Kick RECHTEL out of LLNL.
3. Have LLNL run by a public enity.
Nothing will change. It's all talk and no action -- much as before.
"To be blunt," said Chu, "the best and the brightest didn’t want to be weapons designers...they wanted to fill out LLNL Work Permits!"
Chu later stated that DOE/NNSA has pledged to level entire forests in order to generate sufficient paper work for managers to hide behind in the event some unpleasant should happen while in pursuit of this mythical "science"!
Yeah, get us out of LLNS, put us back under UC and give us our UC pension back as if we had no broken service. If you can't do that then give us all one months pay for every year of service (tax free ) and let us get on down the road.
LLNS was the biggest mistake DOE / LLNL ever mad. As far as alternative enery goes LIFE is NOT it and having been in the alternative energy program before I can tell you that LLNL is NOT the place to do that type of work especially if it's under LLNS for profit mineset.
How to attract the best and the brightest?
GM: please save taxpayers money and don't go out looking for a consulting group to do a study.
The answer is free:
- Have the Lab get out from under the tyranny of NNSA. It is sucking
creativity, productivity and morale out of us.
- Give better benefits, such a pension plan or a high matching 401k plan, for newcomers.
- Stop giving insulting 1/4 % raises to people who are still at LLNL. You know they will run for the door once the economy improves.
- Last but not least, layoff all the leeches and those with "deputy" in their title, if they do not perform specific tasks with measurable results.
Anyone who has looked into it would realize that the LLNLS pension is in much better shape than UC's.
August 8, 2009 7:21 PM
Show us the numbers please . Make us believers. I sure as hell don't believe you.
Why does the lab need the best and brightest? I'd say it only needs a few top-notch scientists, and the rest can, and should, be average quality.
Why pay managers 150k+ a year? They can be hired from college for 50k a year. Taxpayers should not have to overpay on these salaries and benefits. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to push papers around and show up to meetings.
"Why pay managers 150k+ a year?"
This is way low for all the managers I know at LLNL. Most are above $200K. That's group leaders and above who really don't manage projects or people.
August 11, 2009 7:22 PM
You raise some good points...
To conduct business the labs need a cadre of talented and experienced technical staff including material scientists, chemists, weapons phyicists, engineers, technicians and intel types to keep our capability current. Since the timeframe to learn this arcane technology is a long one, incentives are needed for these folks to stick around.
Since the cold war ended, weapons science alone can't attract enough adequate talent; so one needs attractive scientific thrusts (NIF, Fusion, lasers, ACI, HEAF) to interest them.
So on examination it appears that the country needs some above average technical people paid at an above average rate to aid retention.
Now the over-paid managers argument that you raise seemed to have merit. Until I realized that I only noticed management here - in 30 years - when it was bad. And there is plenty that was not so good, including my own.
It actually takes a long time to become an effective technical manager, one that has seen enough both success and mistakes to know what a team must do to accomplish work. Mistakes occur along the way, big and small, benign and significant. A very experienced manager is somewhat invisible to the team and avoids most mistakes. He may add 15% to a top down cost estimate because it was not adequately scoped, or take 15% off of a bottoms-up because scope is double counted. He may even structure a team to work well together in the way the team organizes; reports and works together. He may occasionally see mistakes before they happen. And with long experince he begins to grow and reward his own talent over time, rather than just raiding others (something Moses must still learn).
A good example of recent questionable judgement, possibly due to low salaries attracting middling talent, is when the core UC team managing the labs agreed to bid on the NNSA contract to a manage LANL and LLNL at the transition. We, the country, the Congress, and the Lab may have been better served if the core team had said "NO" when asked to bid on the new contract... rather declining with... "as you have this structured this new contract, it will not work well and we refuse to participate in dismembering the functional entity in which UC invested so much."
Gutsy move, an all of nothing gamble. But the perhaps the only choice with a chance of keeping the Dingell-lead retaliation against Los Alamos mistakes from ruining the Design labs. But I believe the the beginning of the deterioration of LLNL will be marked by historians as the last day of Contract 48.
No $50k kid out of school is going to stand in peril for what's right. He doesn't know what's right and has no investment in the success of the institution, nor the financial independance to be courageous.
GM's founding genius knew this. When Durant consolidated the disparate elements into the operating divisions when GM was founded, he made sure the leaders were very well paid. So well paid they could use independant judgement, to make sure the Division got the best management. LLNL needs this.
Currently LLNL can't get the $300k-per-year folks to do what's right. What we need are managers with talent, experience, independance and iron balls. How much would a Johnny Foster (TRW), a George Schultz (Bechtel) or a Sam Teng (MIT/CERN)take to work here?
This argues instead for above average compensation to retain above average talent in the core scientific staff, with a few geniuses very highly paid to be the bullwark against the undiscovered threat.
And we need some multi-million dollar per year management folks, 'cause what we are paying now ain't attracting talent adequate to surmount the challenges that NNSA places in their path.
Or Chu could drop D'Agostino, whose performance is an argument against low pay for senior management.
Dr. Chu,
Please don't believe the recent NNSA and LLNS hype touting how wonderful everything is at the weapon labs.
In reality, your weapon labs are quickly dieing under the management of a for-profit construction company (Bechtel). This is no way to run a once "crown jewel" national lab.
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