Anonymous wants to know who/what is getting funded and who/what is getting cut.
Any news?
Any news?
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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Highlights:
- RRW is ZEROed
- $270M new money for Non-Proliferation, includes:
• an additional $60 million in “proliferation detection to expand research in critical research and development for high-risk, high return nuclear detection capabilities”
• an additional $20 million for the implementation of a sustained research and development capacity in nuclear detection and nuclear materials security.
• an additional $20.5 million for nuclear explosion monitoring.
- National Technical Nuclear Forensics Center: $15 million (down from the FY2008 budget
request of $16.9 million and up from FY2007 spending of $13.3 million) for nuclear forensics research to improve the scientific and technical capability to identify the source, nature and use of nuclear materials.
Based on these firm numbers, shouldn't we be focusing on building up the nuclear non-proliferation program at LLNL rather than over-hyping the nuclear forensics area? Why would there ever be a large investment in learning about "after the fact"? Isn't it a better investment to attempt to stop the event from happening?
I just have a few LDRD related news and rumor. It seems the lab is spreading the LDRD even thinner than in previous years. One of my ER accounts just got halved. They say it's fine to cut the deliverables too. They are delusional enough to think that the deliverables that I write down are more important than completing the real aims of the project!
Someone else I know had their ER essentially cut in half although oddly they told him he was getting 100% of what he asked for. Seemingly they just had the wrong dollar amount written down in the first place. Unbelievable!
And it seems they intend to fund as many SIs as possible at a low level rather than make proper investments in a few larger projects. This is known as the the "s**t at the fan" approach. It's clear that the management is even more clueless and even more scared to commit to anything than they've ever been.