What is the story behind the new guards at LLNL?
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
April 4, 2013 at 6:25 PM
You show ignorance about what NNSA believes is worth protecting with its security forces. Hint: it isn't employees. Never has been. National security assets only (i.e., SNM and classified information. That does not include you.
I think the guards are still there to render tactical services if that is ever called for.
s/ Respectful Fool
If "tactical services" are needed at the Lab, they would come from either the East Alameda Tactical Team (joint SWAT team from Livermore and Pleasanton city police departments) or the Alameda County Sheriff SWAT team. San Joaquin County Sheriff SWAT team covers Site 300.
Also, the Lab's SRT was never intended or specifically trained to "protect" or rescue employees - their primary mission was protection of SNM, and offensive assaults into Superblock to kill the bad guys if they made it that far. Remember, from an SNM protection planning point of view, any security incident outside the Superblock had to be treated as a potential diversion, and Lab SRT would not have responded to it. The local SWAT teams (East County and AlCO Sheriff) would have responded while Lab SRT moved in to defensive positions in/around Superblock.
This has now all gone away with the removal of Cat I/II SNM. However, the tactical protection of employees is still the same - outside law enforcement SWAT.
Finally, remember the funding of the protection of SNM was direct "fenced" money from DOE HQ; $100M a year. So if the Lab had wanted to keep the SRT (and all the training required to maintain it), the money would now have to come out of the Lab's indirect overhead. And as mentioned earlier, their actually mission (protect SNM) has gone away.