So Jeff Wisoff continues on as the AD of the NIF Directorate fending off reputed challenges from Dunning, a guy from LLE, and who knows who else. Sounds like business as-usual, as NIF turns more and more into a facility operations and maintenance organization.
https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2014/Jun/NR-14-06-02.html
https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2014/Jun/NR-14-06-02.html
Comments
Hey give Omar a break he is trying to make the best of the situation.
As for Ed. M well like all good corporations the CEO's have golden parachutes. The managers will never turn on their own, they take endless training about loyalty to other managers and besides they know that if they turn on Ed that their turn will be next.
The NIF failure is and always will be on the renegade workforce of arrogant scientists and engineers who think they know better. Who else could be to blame? We all know scientists are arrogant, absent minded, weird and very creepy. Well most of them there are a few who dress well and get it but you understand my point. NIF is just another of long list of failures when you let scientists be in charge. I am sure there must of have been some science involved in making the computer but who who where the leaders that invented computers? Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet. These people where never trained as scientists yet they are the ones who made science useful. We need to get these kinds of people in the labs, people who do not have a chip on their shoulder about having gone to college, who think that a Ph.d matters. Ed did his best but he was under the constraint of dealing with such a wacko workforce. Could have done better?
Did the science teacher flunk you in school?
Poor bitter person.
Greetings from an arrogant,wacko, weird scientist. Hope you feel better now.
June 16, 2014 at 5:39 PM
The most astonishingly ignorant statement I've read in at least a week. He had everything to do with selling NIF, especially selling the notion that the program (not the project) was a straightforward engineering exercise. He destroyed entire progams, swaggering across the DOE complex, and then destroyed the credibility of those that were left.
You must be a real newbie on this blog then.
Moses was NOT HERE when NIF was planned, evaluated, and accepted by DOE. I don't know how even you can argue otherwise.
As to "swaggering across the complex, destroying programs", again, I think you have a very narrow and naive point of view. It's just not true.
This thread has diverged from its initial subject! How can that happen???
June 17, 2014 at 11:23 AM
It was exactly Ed who caused NIF to fail, precisely because of his personality and actions. He didn't design the targets or make the technical calls on margin, religious believers in AX who are mostly still around did that. But Ed chose to empower them because he wanted to believe too, vision of fame and glory, and because those same religious believers stroked his enormous arrogant ego that controlled all his decisions. Maybe it was never possible to get megajoules of yield on NIF, maybe the laser is too small, no one knows. But it was possible to position the program to have a recovery plan and know much more about where the problems are, and it could have been done if the religious believers had been kept on the sidelines and if saner voices had been in charge. Ed squandered billions and billions of dollars on the NIC, because he wanted to believe it was just an engineering job and because the designers assured him that it was, and was something he alone could champion to success. And those billions didn't go elsewhere, so he did indeed have the power to destroy programs.
June 18, 2014 at 12:44 PM
I would have, and it doesn't matter exactly why. You have to look at the history of the program and understand how progress is made and when the codes fail. They fail when they are extrapolated too far into unknown regimes, and ignition conditions on NIF are a totally new regime. You don't know how they will fail, or what new physics you will learn finding out why the fail, but you bet the farm they will fail and you include that in all your plans - the codes will be wrong, so how do we sneak up on the new regime in a stepwise scientific way. When you are blinded by religion, you don't worry about that because you believe in the codes. Before mid-2000's, there were plans (albeit fuzzy plans) to sneak up on it, but by the time Moses became NIF AD those were squashed.
Well done!
Great post!
June 19, 2014 at 1:21 PM
Are you still bitching about Ed Moses taking your seat? Get a life!
While it did not achieve ignition, it was a tremendous feat. And as others have pointed out ... he didn't sell the original concept ... but did step in and do the best possible job at realizing earlier commitments by LLNL for the facility.
It is doubtful that any other LLNL manager could have come close to the performance demonstrated by Moses. Not surprisingly, other large-scale projects have also recognized his unusual capabilities for delivering the near-impossible, and are now putting him to work again.