I am hearing rumors that Mike Dunne (former head of Laser Fusion Energy in NIF and leading the LIFE program) has been selected to be the new director of LCLS at SLAC. Does anyone know more?
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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We call it Riding the Gravy Train.
What, no high-foot LIFE program?
Got any openings? How about posting the address we should apply to?
What is SLAC and why should LLNL pay for it?
Is SLAC paid with overhead dollars? Where is the value added? Has someone looked into this?
Who is paying for SLAC and why are they paying for it? What is done at SLAC that is so valuable? If there was real value to such a thing that the private market would pay for it. What kind of people work at SLAC?
SLAC is mostly funded by Office of Science. SLAC performs a wide variety of projects these days, wich tend to focus around basic research. They are still involved in High Energy Physics. They run one of the new space telescope projects. They also do quite a lot of basic materials research using various exotic "light sources". One of these, the Linac Coherent Light Source, uses the old "2-mile accelerator" to produce short pulsed, extremely high brightness x-rays which are used to probe materials for the basic atomic and molecular mechanisms for important processes. This is useful for a wide variety of studies, including solar energy, designing new catalysts, biosciences, medicine, etc, etc, etc. Some of this is paid for by actual "paying customers" like pharmaceutical companies.
Office of Science pays for these studies because it's their mission to advance, and because these are things that may someday be important to all us.
The people who work at SLAC are pretty similar to those who work at LLNL. They're a little less public-service oriented, and a little more science-geeky (in my experience). They are also less "disciplined" and a little more informal, because they are not as tightly regimented as LLNL is (by DOE).
That's not what I hear. I hear SLAC are the smarties, LBNL are next smarties, and then LLNL.
The people who work at SLAC are pretty similar to those who work at LLNL. They're a little less public-service oriented, and a little more science-geeky (in my experience). They are also less "disciplined" and a little more informal, because they are not as tightly regimented as LLNL is (by DOE)."
"May be important for us?" What you mean by you us Mr scientist? LLNL is bad enough but why on heavens good green earth, sun, solar systems, galaxy, local group should the US taxpayer be billed for more geeks to play in sandboxes? Wow just wow! At the very least why is SLAC not run by a LLC like LLNL, at least there would be some non-government corporate control that would drastically reduce the waste and provide for real accountability. Government funding for science is not the solution to our problems; government funding for science is the problem.
Don't fret though, commuting from the Livermore Valley to Page Mill is suicide, and affordable housing isn't within 100 megaton blast radius of SLAC,
And ignorance is bliss
August 26, 2014 at 11:09 AM"
Ever read Ayn Rand?
Wow.
https://news.slac.stanford.edu/announcement/all-employee-memo-lcls-director-announcement