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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Terry's comments are disingenuous. Terry views himself as the next Lab Director and is beginning to make his move. Did I hear him call the current LANS Management team extraterrestrials? Go get him Ewok.
The “…turning over of a new leaf for the labs” was never about science – it was about “Compliance” aka, no more safety & security issues. The anti-nuke crowd has convinced Congress (who has in turn convinced the public) that any time we have safety or security issues at our weapons labs we are on the verge of killing thousands of citizens or giving away all our national secrets.
A climate of intense risk aversion has become the culture. Whether we have 1 or 1000 designing new bombs that are safer & more secure than the aging stockpile is no longer permitted. Perhaps others are correct – LANL/LLNL should become another energy/general purpose lab.
The Blogs have become silent – all is just fine.
This gets raised repeatedly. Would it have been better to lay those technical staff off and contract remidiation specialists from the outside? Is an organization not suppose to rebalance its efforts to meet current needs? Or should it just take cleanup money and use it to fund research or whatever work scope the employees are most comfortable with?
This gets raised repeatedly. Would it have been better to lay those technical staff off and contract remidiation specialists from the outside? Is an organization not suppose to rebalance its efforts to meet current needs? Or should it just take cleanup money and use it to fund research or whatever work scope the employees are most comfortable with?
June 25, 2010 10:17 PM
Here's the rub on this. LANS did not select Weapon workers through any process. There was a disproportionate number of women and minorities selected. The person making this comment, like many others, have no clue the disrespectful and unprofessional way that LANS treated these workers. Many of the workers that were transfered had more than 20-years experience in the Weapons programs. I had 30-years myself. The work we have been assigned to is demeaning and sometimes dirty work. It's easy to defend what LANS did here if your sitting in your nicely decorated, color coordinated office in the NSSB where you don't get your clothes dirty, get the maximum daily radiation dose, and have the rats and roaches crawling over your lunch. Come out and visit the trenches at TA-46 aka "the LANS nuclear dump". All I can say to this person is that I would be happy to trade you jobs.
As far as lab morale goes, it's only become worse over this last year under Bechtel and the LLCs. Many in the scientific staff are just going through the motions and have given up on the lab's upper management team.
NO. It's "PBIs, Baby" and check your shoe wear daily.
The trend at the NNSA labs is pretty well set by now. Bechtel and BWXT call the shots and UC is no where to be found. It's not about science any more. It's about making profits for the corporate "partners", growing the support orgs and the highly paid management, hiring the Bechtel Buddies for the sub-contractor jobs and keeping the LLC executive team in fine suits, big houses and expensive cars.