Is it true that LLNS is acquiring a subsidiary (Sandia across the street)?
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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Originally Sandia was formed out of a LANL engineering division to specifically bring a solid engineering management discipline to the development of atomic/nuclear weapons. Thus allowing LANL management to focus on the more fuzzy underlying science of the weapons.
So when LLNL was opened as the second design lab, it was obvious that a second Sandia site was needed to provide engineering to LLNL's designs.
Merging the two labs would be counter to the whole reason they exist in the first place. However, I had heard that there is a proposal circulating in DOE/NNSA HQ to close SNL/CA and move its work to SNL/Albuquerque. The "empty" SNL/CA campus would then be transferred to LLNL, and converted into an "open" research park possibly as part of the LVOC (Livermore Vally Open Campus) project that is now underway.
This approach would expedite the efforts to allow private companies and institutions to move close to LLNL and create public-private research opportunities. LVOC (and the federal government) wouldn't have to build new buildings, just renovate closed existing ones on the SNL/CA site. Its an easier case to make to congress that the government is not spending public tax dollars on new buildings for private companies to use, but is just giving them "excess" space in empty government buildings that they can use at their cost. This may be what the original poster is referring to.
Given how little interaction on a day to day basic there actually is between LLNL and SNL/CA, moving SNL/CA to NM would probably have little impact on LLNL's weapons work. Most of what SNL/CA does these days has nothing to do with LLNL - compared to its early days in Livermore when 100% of its work support LLNL.
Interesting idea but I doubt the political and bureaucratic stakeholders will approve this idea.
Wake up and smell the coffee, LLNL & LANL. Your 'science' lab status withered away years ago. However, many of your employees clearly still view themselves as "Legends in their own minds".
"Our history reflects the changing national security needs of postwar America. Although Sandia originated as a single-mission engineering organization for nonnuclear components of nuclear weapons, today it is a multiprogram laboratory engaging in research supporting a broad spectrum national security issues.
Sandia began in 1945 as Z Division, the ordnance design, testing, and assembly arm of Los Alamos National Laboratory. It became Sandia Laboratory in 1948 and, in 1949, Sandia Corporation was established as a Western Electric company to manage the laboratory."
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"At Sandia, national security is our business. We apply advanced science and engineering to help our nation and allies detect, repel, defeat, or mitigate national security threats."
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From the llnl.gov website
"The Laboratory was established in 1952 at the height of the Cold War to meet urgent national security needs by advancing nuclear weapons science and technology. Renowned physicists E.O. Lawrence and Edward Teller argued for the creation of a second laboratory to augment the efforts of the laboratory at Los Alamos.
At his laboratory on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, Lawrence had created the model of how large-scale science should be pursued — through multidisciplinary team efforts. Activities began at Livermore under the aegis of the University of California with a commitment by its first director, Herbert York, to follow Lawrence’s team-science approach and be a “new ideas” laboratory."
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"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a mission of strengthening the United States’ security through development and application of world-class science and technology to:
- Enhance the nation’s defense;
- Reduce the global threat from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction;
- And respond with vision, quality, integrity and technical excellence to scientific issues of national importance."
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Bottom line; two different labs, with two different histories and management cultures....
May 21, 2013 at 7:56 PM
Teller convinced the government to establish LLNL (then LRL) to develop the "Super." Since then, the justification for keeping it open (until the end of the cold war, at least) has been necessary competition and peer review in weapons work.