H2-boron plasma fusion breakthrough

 H2-boron plasma fusion breakthrough

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/100-000-years-of-power-us-japan-team-hails-h2-boron-plasma-fusion-breakthrough/2-1-1411318

Lab leak likely origin of COVID

 I know some people will say this has nothing to do with the labs, however DOE, LLNL and LANL did a lot of high profile work on Covid and even it so origins. Now DOE is is saying the lab leak is the most likely scenario.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a
Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says
U.S. agency’s revised assessment is based on new intelligence

So this would just make relations between China and the US even worse. It is amazing how in 2004 we went from Nanos, members of congress and even people at the labs saying how the labs are irrelevant and nuclear weapons will play no role in the future of the world. Now in 2023 we closer to nuclear war than most of the times in the cold war. Of course some weird blog naysayer will say this is irrelevant to the labs. I am not sure if these people are just miss-informed, really bitter, or some kind of foreign trolls.

Blog purpose

 This BLOG is for LLNL present and past employees, friends of LLNL and anyone impacted by the privatization of the Lab to express their opinions and expose the waste, wrongdoing and any kind of injustice against employees and taxpayers by LLNS/DOE/NNSA. “

Scooby, I think your blog purpose statement is valuable. When there are topics relating to Ukraine, ballon’s from foreign countries drifting over the USA, etc., there is interest and usually, reasonably polite comments exchanged. However, it seems as soon as a topic focuses on your actual impact of privatization blog purpose statement above, the discussion quickly becomes polarized, where some commenters would like to table value added Lab changes, while others think the subject is out of our collective lane.

The 2014 article below suggests a “public interest model” for NNSA Labs. It doesn’t explicitly state the for-profit management model is on the way out, but as we know, LANL has been managed by a non-profit contractor since 2018.

https://www.govexec.com/management/2014/05/nuclear-weapons-complex-reform-could-mean-pay-cut-contractors/84475/

Fire at Oak Ridge

 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11781695/Fire-involving-URANIUM-breaks-Tennessee-National-Security-Complex.html

Not only that but I leaned the first atomic bomb was built in Tennessee.

"The Oak Ridge complex was home to the Manhattan Project for research and development during World War II, which produced the first nuclear weapons."

Treaty suspended

 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-ukraine-war-vladimir-putin-speech_n_63f48a5ce4b0c87f32f319d7

Putin also said that Russia would suspend its participation in a treaty aimed at keeping a lid on nuclear weapons expansion. The so-called New START Treaty was signed by Russia and the U.S. in 2010. It caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads they can deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.

On the up side maybe everyone start testing again! woo hoo!!!

Off-topic

 So the Physics-Theory Division had a fairly controversial Speaker:

Dr. Taharee A. Jackson, she has written some pretty hard left CRT, DEI stuff that is mixed with strong extreme left wing politics. Type her name into google and you will see what I mean.

Why was this talk in seminar series for science, it had no actual science in it at
all. Overall the talk had a lot of personal anecdotes a lot of comments that where completely wrong and very little in the way of actual statistics. All the tropes against men and whites are known to be completely wrong and trivial to check. Some of the specific actions to do at the workplace seemed legit but we already have a lot of this already but maybe someone got something of it. The talk also seemed to have clear political bent to with. I liked the picture with DeSantis as a bad guy. She should have stuck with specific actions, links to other programs that work and so on.

LLNL to be Test-Bed for Future NNSA Contracts

LLNL to be Test-Bed for Future NNSA Contracts

https://www.defensedaily.com/new-livermore-model-contract-could-help-shape-coming-competition-for-pantex-nnsa-official-says/nuclear-modernization/

Otra vez!

 Another balloon blown out of the sky.

We don't know where it's from, but all the parts are labeled in Mandarin and originate from China. So our best guess is it was sent by Putin from Russia!

Beware: Russian hackers!

 Comer and Lucas Press for Docs Related to DOE Labs Targeted by Russian Hackers

“According to recent reports, between August and September 2022, a Russian hacking team, known to support Russian government information operations, created false login pages for three DOE National Laboratories and sent emails to nuclear scientists to elicit their passwords. The targeted labs—Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—work on scientific research critical to the United States’ national security and competitiveness.”

https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-and-lucas-press-for-docs-related-to-doe-labs-targeted-by-russian-hackers/

Security Clearance not Granted

 Security Clearance not Granted after Local Security Office (LSO) received potentially derogatory QNSP information (Personal Conduct Guideline E) regarding the Individuals QNSP misrepresentations about completing a Bachelor’s Degree in 1997, and about “bills or debts turned over to a collection agency”

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2023-01/PSH-22-0139.pdf

Chinese balloon

 What do people here think of the Chinese spy balloon? I think it was clear it was meant to obtain surveillance data on the minuteman sites.

Greg Mello on NIF

 I found this gem from From Greg Mello on NIF

15 January, 2023

There is no potential whatsoever to create useful energy from matter in this extremely expensive boondoggle. It is not even necessary for "stockpile stewardship." The Naval Research Laboratory, cognizant LANL scientists, the then-director of Sandia National Laboratories, dissident senior Livermore laser scientists, and pretty much everybody without a conflict of interest ever since would agree with that assessment, as would -- in my opinion, anyone with a quantitative bent to put pencil to paper, slide rule to hand, or computer to use. Many of us brought up these points before this laser-the-size-of-the-Rose-Bowl-stadium was built. Perhaps the most telling comment was provided on the sidelines at that time, in Oakland, by one MIT physicist to me: he thought it was his job to provide jobs for physicists, many if not most of whom work in the defense and nuclear weapons industries.

That was the goal. Oh, let's also count stockpile stewardship "founder" Vic Reis, who said to me, in the presence of then-LANL director Charlie McMillan, that NIF would be retiring before long, leaving Livermore without a clear raison d'etre. In fact, Reis said, the maturity of the stockpile stewardship would leave both of the huge physics labs without a clear mission. The answer to the first problem, said a White House official to me (in case it wasn't clear enough to anyone with eyes in their head) would be a new Livermore-designed warhead, the W87-1, for which LANL would make the plutonium pits, under Livermore's direction. The answer to the second problem, the LANL problem, would be assisted if LANL took it upon itself to build a small nuclear reactor, McMillan and Reis told me. Would I help in selling this idea to Governor Grisham, they said? No I would not. Unfortunately the lack of scientific literacy in our population makes it easy to con people, as Nakhleh is doing here. He scratches Livermore's back and Livermore scratches LANL's. 

Perhaps he has conned himself. Maybe he really believes this crap. It's never possible to sift the lies from the self-deception. As the cognizant White House official said to me a couple of years ago, LANL pit production is a gigantic scheme to keep Livermore well-funded. Deception on this scale confuses ordinary people. It doesn't jibe with the democratic and techno-magical fairy tales many people have gradually come to accept, like children. Both "fusion energy" from inertial confinement or from magnetic confinement are fairy tales. The former serves the nuclear weapons community, and both employ physicists and are essentially physics demonstrations, not steps on any ladder to practical energy sources. In this case, the supposed net energy gain isn't real, not by a long shot, but rather arises from the omission of the vast energy inputs needed to create the laser beams, and of course the vast energy needed to create and run the machine. NIF is a gigantic energy sink, not a source.