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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Indirectly, the scare-tactic scenarios and costly bureaucracy of the safety weenies helped speed its demise.
Although security cost is often blamed, it is only one part of a poor cost/benefit ratio.
More than enough time has passed in order to ask why the current administration has not reversed the policies that are hurting LLNL. Obama already has a long record of undoing anything Bush ordered. So either the administation doesn't care or were actively ensuring the weapons complex's demise long ago as part of Congress and now just continuing with the gameplan from a different office.
Lab employees need to stop believing that the messiah otherwise know as Obama is going to swoop into Livermore with an host of angels to destroy LLNS and proclaim the beginning of a new millenium of research bliss. If you want to continue working on weapons learn to speak Russian, Chinese, or Farsi.
What's their pay scale and do they have a nice pension? More important, do they have a broken organization like NNSA running their weapon labs and are their labs run by greedy for-profit LLCs who seem eager to destroy worker morale?
For starts:
- there is a new DOE head
- there will be a replacement for Tauscher
- etc.
Take initiative, be courageous, and get your a.. involved if you really care!
Threatened LANL,
"strike one"
scared the "white flag" democrats
"Strike two"
No interest in B111.
"Sit down, old timer"
I had my a** involved for years. Watched it all go down the toilet as the contract changed. No one else joined me in fighting back, just fools saying I was wrong and it was going to be ok.
The new secretary of DOE wants nothing to do with NNSA, much less the labs. Tauscher did nothing for us before and promises to do even less as a treaty writer. Take the happiness pills and keep hoping for a sunny day, blah, blah, blah.
I gave up hoping for LLNL quite a while ago and left. There are good people still there and you have to feel sorry for them. But there is no rolling back the clock on this. All you can do is leave now or endure a lot of pain and be let go later. There are no other options.
How bad can it be to work for the Russians compared to who has been in charge the last few years?
Don't forget who was running the show when we had our most recent layoff.
Don't forget who was running the show when management was put out for bid.
The test-ban which started cuts in DNT was under Clinton. So was the formation of NNSA and heavy-handed rules like changes to polygraph testing. And pay scale for computer scientists lagged so badly behind the real world that a 10% bonus had to handed out one year.