This guy should have been the director for all DOE Labs!
Here are Q&As with him I took from LANL's Blog.
Full text
Here are Q&As with him I took from LANL's Blog.
Full text
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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DoE/NNSA/Congress have all made a mess of the weapon's complex. It needs fixing NOW.
Moving the weapons complex to DoD, getting rid of contractor operators both seem like good ideas in my opinion.
I say, take the two NNSA labs and the production facilities, place them under DOD, and then fire all the staff running NNSA, starting at the top with D'Agostino.
"(c) There never was effective, cohesive management of the three weapons labs, although in truth it was never possible to “manage” the labs in any traditional sense. The fact has been well established that the Federal government is incapable of “managing the advancement of science” (even though periodically it tries this, through civil-service labs, but untarnished by success.) Because of this fact, the GOCO system (Government-owned, Contractor-operated) was created. The GOCO contractors originally were the nation’s best companies (or universities) in science and technology, who brought their business practices and approaches to the labs. There are only one or two of these left today, with the rest being mostly small outfits whose main business is “running the labs for the government’, motivated by fees they can earn (which was never the case in the original complex.) Worse yet, the bureaucracy of DOE (ERDA, or AEC) has continued to grow and have attempted to “take control” of the labs, and the model has deteriorated more and more to a “government-owned and operated” complex. There are now no longer any barriers to preventing the constantly burgeoning government bureaucracy from being imposed on the labs (and plants) and the advantages of having “private-sector” organizations for their functions has long since vanished. The original approach had been to have the labs responsible for innovations. The labs would propose their ideas to the government and to the military, and once agreement was established between them on “What was to be done”, the labs took over the process of how it should be done and carried the responsibility for achieving the agreed goals. My deeply held conviction is that the GOCO model has deteriorated so far, that it must now either be eliminated or drastically rejuvenated (with a new agency and a “clean sheet of paper.”)"
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From the fact sheet...
- Remove CAT I/II quantities of special nuclear material from the site by the end of 2012 and achieve down-grading of “Superblock” buildings 332 & 334;
- Reduce acreage supported by NNSA’s weapons account by 90% with a status change for Site 300;
- Reduce buildings and structures supported by NNSA’s weapons account by 30%; and
- Over a decade or so, up to 20% fewer staff supporting nuclear weapons activities. These reductions are expected through natural attrition and transfer of personnel to other positions supporting essential national security needs.
And in the SNL fact sheet
- Transitioning of SNL/California (410 acres) to a multi-agency lab in order to significantly reduce NNSA landlord costs;
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Look people. They're going to do whatever they want to regardless of what we think about it. All we can do at this point in time is express our opinions on the blog and watch the show. The fact is, "It was over the day LLNS took over"
It's not about the care and feeding of a science-based workforce any longer. It's only about the profit fees and high executive salaries than LLNS can milk from this lab.
It's over. The fat lady has finished her song and people are quickly clearing out of the auditorium to look for a better performance somewhere else. Maybe if you stick around they can use you for some low wage janitorial work.