Was the culture of reprisal at LANSLLNS a contributing factor to the ~0.5 billion dollar WIPP environmental disaster? Were experienced lab employees reluctant to speak up when it could have made a difference in the WIPP outcome?
Tri-Valley Cares needs to be on this if they aren't already. We need to make sure that NNSA and LLNL does not make good on promises to pursue such stupid ideas as doing Plutonium experiments on NIF. The stupidity arises from the fact that a huge population is placed at risk in the short and long term. Why do this kind of experiment in a heavily populated area? Only a moron would push that kind of imbecile area. Do it somewhere else in the god forsaken hills of Los Alamos. Why should the communities in the Bay Area be subjected to such increased risk just because the lab's NIF has failed twice and is trying the Hail Mary pass of doing an SNM experiment just to justify their existence? Those Laser EoS techniques and the people analyzing the raw data are all just BAD anyways. You know what comes next after they do the experiment. They'll figure out that they need larger samples. More risk for the local population. Stop this imbecilic pursuit. They wan...
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Is the WIPP disaster one of many failed, skipped, or cursory process reviews currently in play at LANL or LLNL? It is a reasonable question given the gross negligence in the WIPP situation. Read the DOE IG report.
BS. Though some personal excesses are inevitable, the is no regular, tolerated culture of retaliation at
"...Don't forget Mara, Knapp, Anastasio, and McMillan were/are from Livermore. We were created to be competitive, however, LANS/LLNS brought us together at the hip. Its an incestuous culture, like it or not. You in denial!..."
As clearly written in the FMEA description of terms, if the probability is low of an event ("no regular tolerated culture of retaliation at LLNL"), where the event here is failure to raise a concern, but the resulting consequence is catastrophic, the event must be addressed to the satisfaction of the design review committee, and or involved agencies.
Unfortunately lab employee fear of retaliation can easily bleed over from a low impact (non-catastrophic) activity to a high impact activities with catastrophic potential. This is why a consistently applied "open door" safety policy at the labs is of paramount importance to lab employees and the surrounding communities. We do wish to have a "6 Sigma safety" culture at the labs yes?
I do not doubt that there some culture of reprisal but I would that the situation is more complicated. If there is any one culture that is a problem at the labs and LANL in particular is that of a bad management culture. This leads to three things, (1) Us versus them mentality, where workers do not trust managers and fear them. If the workers lose trust in the management than these leads to all sorts of problems. (2) Management never leads it only reacts and the reaction is not address problems but to cover themselves. This of course means that these problems are never fixed and arise again. (3) Management positions are not based on merit or qualifications but award systems for being loyal to the management. Overtime this means that you have very poor quality managers. Of course one of the reasons they need to cover themselves is because they are so poorly qualified. A common analogy that managers seem to often use is that the labs are a house of cards, a myth, that you cannot shake and could come down at any moment. The thing is that it is actually described the managers much better.
There had always been some this as far as I can remember but once the contract change occurred it went into overdrive as the number of managers grew. Many of the new managers have very little to do in terms of actual work so they then create this narrative that the labs themselves have very little to do. They only interact with other managers, avoid communicate with the workforce, and belittle those who do real work all so that they can keep the facade going in their own minds. In private you can talk with some of them and they will admit some of this but will say that the lab has changed and the whole modern United States is corrupt and one has to adapt to the new reality. They than go to make a list of how things or just as bad at Universities, the military, Wall street, etc. Personally I do not believe this and even if part of it is true one should run to embrace it but should try to resist it.
Did anyone notice the email that was sent out by Charlie this weekend on retaliation? Something is going on.
I agree, but a cultural of reprisal can wick its way into a procedure, activity, or review process. It does not take frequent reprisals to "refresh" the fear or hesitation to speak up, especially when manager/employee trust is already fragile. Fear of blow back is hard to reverse once established. If "Billy Bob" gets burnt by his manager for raising a concern or "stepping on his toes", the manager's victory is shallow, short lived, and can have long term consequences for the labs.
From the web link below, LANSLLNS would struggle with
"Three Sigma"
-well defined responsibility and accountability at ALL levels
and fail to reach
"Four Sigma"
-quality of supervision, attitude toward safety, manager/employee communication, hazard correction, employee involvement, program awareness, support for safety, safety climate, and management credibility"
https://safety.cat.com/cda/files/3066657/7/6+Sigma+Safety_Williamsen.pdf
How dare anyone attempt to size up the cluster of failures or work culture at LANSLLNS with some newfangled industry accepted metric. Maybe we should grade on a curve? Drop the lowest grade?
Push ownership for the WIPP disaster back on the state of New Mexico and move on?
There is a big misunderstanding here. We only want to be thought of like a regular "for profit" company when the LANSLLNS worker bee "losers" are complaining about low morale, and management practices. We want to be sheltered from any industry accepted measure of our LANSLLNS performance, and we certainly don't want to be penalized for gross negligence at WIPP.
We are a different breed of "for profit" Google like companies, without ownership of pesky business operation risk factors.
Look how are the workers at LANL/LLNL different from Wallmart workers? We both cost money and are a necessary evil in order to make a profit. If LLNLs/LANS could get rid of all the workers than there would be no safety and security incidents. However we still need people to fill the shelves and run the cash registers so we still need workers at the labs. In any case we have to make do, so WIPP occurs because of the "workers", so it goes, it is the burden than the managers must bear.
January 30, 2015 at 5:16 AM
Were not a rocket at LANL bro, we are in a Yugo and its about catch on fire. Get out!