Actual post from Dec. 15 from one of the streams. This is a real topic. As far as promoting women and minorities even if their qualifications are not as good as the white male scientists, I am all for it. We need diversity at the lab and if that is what it takes, so be it. Quit your whining. Look around the lab, what do you see? White male geezers. How many African Americans do you see at the lab? Virtually none. LLNL is one of the MOST undiverse places you will see. Face it folks, LLNL is an institution of white male privilege and they don't want to give up their privileged positions. California, a state of majority Hispanics has the "crown jewel" LLNL nestled in the middle of it with very FEW Hispanics at all!
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The pictures shown in the report are again of sub standard fence construction, below grade on one example and sloppy concrete pour of another. Those are the type of low tech low hanging fruit that you dangle in front of a politicians eye and he can understand that. And that's what the report comes out swinging with. Mis-management of a low-tech issue. I think the biggest issue I saw in the report was that LANL did not have the contractors/sub-contractors repair their shoddy work. I don't know if the contract was poorly written and there was no way to compel them to do so or oversight was so lax it allowed errors to stack up.
So if snark is what you think I was delivering, it was my interpretation of the leading bullets in the report.
You can spin this all you want but at the end of the day it is a fence. A badly built fence but still a fence. Maybe the problem is that you made it into a complex problem. This is one of LANLs problems, you need to keep it simple. You can say all the bad things you want about Nanos but he understood like all good leaders that it needs to be kept simple. Your group needs to read some Malcom Gladwell. He explains much of this in his bood "Blink" and "What the dog saw". It was just a fence and should have been treated like a fence and it would have been done right.
Heckavajob, LANS. Time for 20% PBI bonuses for all LANL managers. Center of Excellence in large capital project management! What a sick joke.
Keep spinning for as long as you can. Unless your intent was to point out that more government oversight would have prevented the problems, it comes off as "blame anyone but LANL."
January 9, 2014 at 1:08 PM
My intent was to point out the actual content of the report, which many seem to have ignored, obviously a "blame LANL first" attitude. Unless the truth bothers you, there was no "spin."
The IG is on a roll about management at Los Alamos, and it is not limited to construction project management. Reports faulting the culture such as the one last year on the LANSCE radiation contamination into the community were common in the later years of the UC era. As these stack up they can become harbingers of Congressional hearings and, unless LANS can turn it around, subsequent contract change.
AUDIT REPORT: OAS-L-13-15
September 26, 2013
The Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility Replacement Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory
While NNSA has recently taken action to address RLWTF replacement project issues, we observed that the NNSA and Los Alamos had not effectively managed the project over most of its lifecycle. Despite more than 7 years of effort, and the expenditure of $56 million, design work for the TRU facility has not been completed and the project's completion date is 11 years behind schedule. Furthermore, the total estimated cost for the replacement project has increased from $86 million to as much as $214 million, a 149 percent increase. Additionally, independent peer and internal control reviews have noted that NNSA and Los Alamos had not developed reliable life cycle cost estimates, used a Risk Management Plan, and applied Value Engineering principles to optimize the design of the facility.
...it's also at least three new buildings, new access control equipment in two of those buildings, cameras, sensors, lighting, and software integration.
The IG report is bad and what happened is bad - fair enough. But dumbing down what the project really is only shows your careless attitude toward relevant facts.
Thank you for balancing out the snarkiness here.