Secretary Chu's departing note was certainly worthy of the great line
from Amadeus, "Too Many Notes." It was exceptional in the failure to
mention national security, NNSA, weapons, arms control, terrorism,
intelligence, or nuclear forensics. one guesses that he failed to visit
those offices in four years as he played VC with taxpayer funds.
Chu leaves town with the the can of Solyndra tied to his tail, perhaps unjustly. The White House minders may own that one.
However, he has failed to take the hit for far larger offense. After
Fukushima, he did not protest the White House action that locked up all
the data and projections available from NARAC at LLNL. In consequence,
both the Japanese government and the American public were denied
informatkon that would have been operationally useful to the Japanese
and publicly reassuring to our citizens. In no previous major
radiological incident, Chernobyl or the Japanese fuel fab criticality
accident of the late 90s, has such censorship been seen. That the
bill-paying the Congress did not notice this event is astonishing. The
US nuclear power industry was so upset and offended at this lack of
public support that they ramped up their own monitoring and made plots
of incomoimg radiation levels over the US available. Perhaps there will
be time to look into this when a successor is nominated -- and to call
Chu back to explain.
5 comments:
Dr. Chu did some good things also when he was a secretary. He has left DOE and is now back in the Bay Area. Give the guy a break and DO NOT beat bushes. No more negative points on him from now on, please.
Maybe it is the case of the good is often interred with the bones. This is a blog about LLNL which is a member of the nuclear weapons complex which comprises most of the budget of DOE. Chu, like Hazel O'Leary was an absentee landlord of the NWC. Green energy was his chosen mantra and when some of the actions in that arena were found to be failures, those are the albatrosses that are hung around his neck.
With regards to the NWC, he was for the most part a non-entity.
No more negative points on him from now on, please.
June 17, 2013 at 11:44 AM
Nice that you said "please" after your censorship demand.
He would have gotten accolades regardless of solyndra had NIF achieved ignition. Too bad. Chu has too few victories and too many problems under his belt as administrator.
Chu was simply clueless as an administrator. Scientists who "grow up" in academia usually are. No surprise, except that his cluelessness led to so much loss of taxpayer money, and he'll never be held accountable for that.
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