Anonymous contribution:
The LLNL missions of the future in nuclear design and engineering excellence, high-speed computing, and high explosives research should be enough to keep 100-200 people working. The only key player will be NIF. Maybe the rest of the Lab should be shut down, and a fence erected between NIF and the south 40, which will need environmental cleanup before new houses can be built.
On second thought, if the rest of the Lab closes, NIF will have no one to subsidize its operation.
The LLNL missions of the future in nuclear design and engineering excellence, high-speed computing, and high explosives research should be enough to keep 100-200 people working. The only key player will be NIF. Maybe the rest of the Lab should be shut down, and a fence erected between NIF and the south 40, which will need environmental cleanup before new houses can be built.
On second thought, if the rest of the Lab closes, NIF will have no one to subsidize its operation.
Comments
I’m just waiting for management to realize that people can only take so much BS before they walk away. Once LLNL starts to lose their high performers, who they took for granted would stay; maybe then they will realize that impact of their decisions.
Didn't you know. NIF in the future is to be 90% subsidized by those from outside LLNL who want to do experiments. Has anyone sat down and figured out what the cost per shot is really going to be. Once they have done that has anyone looked for potential customers and ask if they are wiling to spend that type of money on a shot that may or may not give the desired results. You'd think the business end of LLNS would be interested in those $$ to see if they are or are not going to make a profit.
I heard that NIF lost some its subsidies at the expense of other Lab programs becasue of the overall Lab budget shortfall. As a result, NIF is now being forced to reduce its own workforce.
NIF can, and regularly does, fire flexible workers who are no longer needed. For career FTEs, NIF just sends them back the the matrix organizations.
Only problem this time is that the NIFties were excluded from the VSSOP. Thus they can't be fired in the ISP.
My group leader thinks that at least two more of us are going to have to leave to absorb this unexpected influx of people.
The safety and other bureacrats have done their job. It is now so costly to "bend metal" and do anything except paperwork that programs are just giving up and closing facilities.
As far a paperwork goes, there are a lot of beltway bandits that will out perform anything the Lab can put together, at a fraction of the cost.