Anonymously contributed:
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I hate to admit it, but as a 20 year employee at the Lab I have to agree with this group’s conclusion…
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Frank Munger’s Atomic Cite Underground
September 12, 2012
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Peace group says kill the NNSA
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The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance today said the time has come to get rid of the National Nuclear Security Administration, saying it's an unnecessary and expensive layer of management and rife with problems.
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"In light of persistent management failures, documented by the General Accounting Office, the (Defense) Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and Inspector General reports, the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance believes the NNSA should be abolished, and management of the nation's nuclear weapons complex should revert to the Department of Energy," the report said.
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Another excerpt: "Aside from an occasional personnel shuffle and a rigorous effort to shift blame to contractors, NNSA's response to criticisms is consistently, 'We get it now, we're compiling lessons learned, we'll do better.' "
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The group added: "But the persistent and recurring evidence of management incompetence at NNSA should raise the existential questions: How does the government receive value added from the NNSA? Does the NNSA do more harm than good? Is the management culture at NNSA fixable?"
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 suspect this is just the attempt at taking a shot at the NWE by going after the sponsor agency (NNSA) that is perceived as being under seige and weakened by politicians and other actors. Or perhaps even worse, they simply are not informed about the players, the institutions/facilities, the relationships, the history, and the dynamics at play.
While I tend to sympathize with groups like these that promote peace, disarmament and/or fiscal conservatism, I generally don't have any tolerance for groups that make poorly argued and poorly articulated statements as they indicate to me a kind of blind fervor that can fuel a mob mentality that is impervious to reason and is incapable of contributing productively towards helping find solutions.
September 13, 2012 4:49 PM
You're kidding, right? Fiscal "conservatism" is never associated with the former two views. You must know this. Give an example of an organization that promotes all three.