From Penrose

Director Parney Albright discussed the challenges the Laboratory faces in addressing the fiscal uncertainty in Washington D.C. during his quarterly update to employees Wednesday. Albright also highlighted recent Laboratory accomplishments and identified promising opportunities for broadening LLNL national security missions.

The most immediate fiscal challenge the Lab and all federal government agencies face is the "sequestration" almost certain to go into effect Friday, March 1, triggering automatic, across-the board spending cuts, Albright said. This will result in a 7.7 percent cut to appropriations for the Laboratory, a reduction of $120 million if sequestration lasts until the end of FY13 (Sept. 30).

In addition to sequestration, Congress also is under a March deadline to address the Continuing Resolution (March 27), under which federal agencies are currently funded, and a May deadline to extend the debt ceiling. Failure to address these budget issues could lead to a complete shutdown of the federal government, Albright said.

"March is going to be a big month," he said. "There's a huge amount of uncertainty."

The Laboratory has been exploring "mitigation options" for addressing sequestration, though "no decisions have been made because we're still in a period of extreme uncertainty," Albright said. He said the primary consideration in developing options has been avoiding layoffs, minimizing the impact to employees and their benefits and "providing an ability to rebound when fiscal issues are resolved."

To absorb the cuts sequestration would entail, the current plan would be for Lab employees to take a 10 percent salary reduction with two closure days a month, according to Albright, noting this would still allow employees to accumulate vacation and sick leave at the current rate. The earliest these reductions would go into effect is March 10.

But the salary reductions are not enough and the Lab will institute "draconian" cuts to travel and procurement budgets to help close the gap, he said.

"We just don't know what's going to happen," Albright said. "I could get a phone call tomorrow morning and all this could change."

"I see signs of crisis fatigue in Washington. I know people all over the country are tired of this," he said. "My hope is that once we get through this period, things will stabilize and we can fully focus on the business of what we do."

For more details about sequestration and LLNL contingency plans, see Newsline.

The view from Washington

On a positive note, Albright said the Laboratory's effort to communicate a vision of what it can do for the country has begun to pay off. "We're starting to hear people talk back to us what we've been saying and that's a good thing."

The importance of the work LLNL does for the broader national security mission is increasingly recognized in the departments of defense and homeland security as well as the intelligence community, Albright said.

"There's a lot of momentum on the congressional side to broaden the mission of the national laboratories," Albright said. "We have capabilities that transcend what anybody else has. And we're now a part of the ecosystem of defense, homeland security and intelligence."

S&T highlights and priorities

LLNL is a "leading contender" to work on weapons systems slated for life extension, Albright said, noting WCI is already leading the work to extend the life of the W78.

The Lab also is fleshing out concepts for an interchangeable warhead that could be used on both the Minuteman missile system and submarine-based Trident, he said.

Experimental work in high energy density physics for stockpile stewardship is progressing thanks to research at the National Ignition Facility, Albright said, adding that NIF recently set a record with three shots in a period of 12 hours.

Citing a National Academy of Science report on fusion energy research that called NIF a unique and premier facility for fusion experiments and other technical reviews, Albright said, "There's no reason to believe we can't achieve ignition at NIF."

Turning to high performance computing, he said Sequoia is undergoing final preparations before swinging over to classified stockpile stewardship work and that Vulcan, the smaller version of Sequoia, would provide a resource for industrial collaboration that would help the regional and national economy.

Albright also said planning is in the works for an even more powerful supercomputer in the 150-200 petaflop/s (quadrillion floating operation per second) range that would serve as a bridge to next-generation exascale computing.

In the area of energy, approval in December 2012 by the Public Utilities Commission of the California Energy Systems for the 21st Century (CES-21), under which LLNL will work with utilities to strengthen the state's energy grid, will pave the way for other energy projects, Albright said. "A lot of people are beating a path to our door to talk about how we could help them."