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...
Comments
I remember the pre-NNSA days. Yeah, the mission was clear: build big bombs and make sure they'll work. But there was a clear science mission too.
Now the two science labs are run by a company which is anything but science oriented. And the mission gets just a little more clearly military and a little less science, year by year.
The NNSA has ruined the science side of its science labs, and that's a shame. But, let's face it, nobody cares.
That's some kind of 10 year anniversary, eh?
The lab "science mission" still exists in the massive PR that both NNSA and LLNS spit out each day. However, if you actually work as a research scientist at these NNSA labs, you've witnessed the massive brain drain as the best scientists flee for better run, non-profit institutions.
The future of "science" at the NNSA labs is in construction and production work. After all, why do you think Bechtel and BWXT are the major LLC partners? This is the new direction which NNSA wants to see at their labs.