Does anyone know?
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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The DOE is looking for an excuse to save money by dumping what they incorrectly assess to be redundant LLNL from the weapons complex (ala, the 1990's Bay Area military base closures), rather than anticipating a market driven response to local pent-up real-estate demand.
Who the heck is wants to leave new, inexpensive, synergistic SF Rincon Basin, Silicon Valley, Berkeley or San Ramon for a remote, polluted, ancient, difficult-access campus, with the taint of unpopular technical activity, that sits atop the Greenville fault?
A simple market survey of potential customers would resolve this in less than a year.
The LLNL location is a very nice, perhaps the most pleasant, weapons complex location, but that's it. Absent weapons related activities and continuing subsidies, it will never compete for University or industry on it's own merit. Look around and you see more rust belt than high tech.
The leaders of LLNS and even more so DOE, are inexperienced development dilettantes who lack something productive to do. They do not understand competitive industry or market economies. Sadly, in this and other "industrial" arenas, they are dumber than Donald Trump; in D'Agostino's case, Donald Duck.
For the most likely outcome, think now defunct and rusting Hunter Point and Mare Island Naval Bases and Alameda Naval Air Station.
Dead zones. Good open spaces to film the high-jinx of "Mythbusters" episodes
And to think the duped taxpayer hands $45M to LLNS "best practices" for this. And probably double that amount each year for incompetent DOE leadership.
It is an ongoing travesty of the formerly UC well-run LLL, who continually and appropriately ignored the dumb demons of Forrestal.
https://str.llnl.gov/Mar11/koonce.html