One story making the rounds is that NNSA had determined that the SNL contract must be competed before the LANL one, and the total contract failure at LANL has created problems for both Labs. Some SNL managers are starting to drop hints that the SNL rebid schedule will be revised in order to get LANL under a new operator more quickly.
Maybe Charlie will discuss the rebid calendar in today's all hands meeting.
Maybe Charlie will discuss the rebid calendar in today's all hands meeting.
Comments
The McMillan talk was content free. Kind of amazing that there was no real information. He says LANS has been great and made huge progress it is just they did not have enough time to carry through with the vision. No one believes that as there is no evidence for any progress only decline since LANS came, but hey LANS is out, so there is always hope. What is so odd that no one seemed to care about his talk, there was literally no questions, only one very bizarre fawning comment about how great McMillion is, the eyes where rolling on that one. Other than that nothing, no one cares, there seems to be no point and oh not a peep about the purpose. Way to go LANS.
LANS and Charlie McMillan have been extremely successful in incorporating an alien invasion of the body snatchers in this place. It's wonderful once you give in to the force. No more excitement, no more cares, no more struggling. Ahhhhhh! Come join us!
Must be hard to go through life as negative as you are.
"What did you expect McMillan to say? Came across as honest and open to me. "
Odd, most people think it came across as deceptive and even confused. There must be whole lot of negative people out there.
January 7, 2016 at 9:43 PM"
UC was happy to operate the labs without reward for 60 years. In the end LANS got 12 years of money which is close to a billion dollars, so there is plenty of award for very little effort on their part and Charlie personally had huge reward. It is now clear the for-profit model for LANL and LLNL has been a colossal failure.
Or, maybe you were expectig him to be honest with you for a change? "Mike led us to earn a contract extension year each and every time we were eligible - the maximum possible was extended under his leadership. I led us to no additional contract extensions in my four years as Director. But don't worry about it, since I 'followed the money' and have pocketed several million per year."
You have to understand that LANS also leverages the money, they get contracts for their spinoff companies, they move hundreds of employees on to LANL, park employees at LANL for a fixed time at huge salaries until they need to be moved to the next assignments, use every loop possible to leverage every dollar every which way. It is cheap easy money. God knows how they came up with 331M on the web site. They can get up to 80M a year at it has been 10 years, judging from the scores over the years they should have gotten at least 500-600M just on the profit margin so they are using some funny math to make themselves look better. Maybe they subtract the United Way giving campaign money which of course is some tax right, but they will not mention than part. Hundreds of millions is still nice for doing absoutly nothing, Ca-Ching
"The old model is gone. It has been gone for decades. Look at the production facilities, the test grounds, and the reactor research facilities. The labs were the last to go."
You are absolutely correct on this point. There is a big difference between the test sites, production and reactor facilities in they are not scientific research organizations and they are much smaller than the labs with much more narrow missions. It does not work for science labs. Why not make Fermilab, ANL, ORNL, PNNL, and NIST for profit corporations? I get that the old model is wrong but can you give one reason how the new model has made LLNL or LANL better and more effective. Where has been the added value of making the labs for profit?
That was weird.
That was weird.
January 8, 2016 at 8:03 AM
Some lawyer must have told him what to say?
January 8, 2016 at 8:07 AM
Ha..you guys are so bad! Funny stuff on the blog today.
Right on! No brain.
The production facilities were MUCH larger than the labs before downsizing. Hanford and Savannah river were 40k people each back in the 80s. More than 10k in the 90s. The complex is in atrophy.
I did not say the for profit model was better. I just said the non for profit model was dead and it is....
PNNL and ORNL are for profit. I don't know about ANL and NIST.
My concern at this point is simple. With the the end of LANS, Pandora's box is open again and NNSA get to cut benefits and freeze the pension program. It happened at the other facility and it is coming. Bet on it.
PNNL is operated by Battelle, which is a private nonprofit company.
I actually would like to see a hybrid of the ORNL and ANL model for LLNL.
A solely UC-Battelle owned LLC to run LLNL. This LLC could then as needed "team" (subcontract) with industrial partners (Bechtel) for specific activities at a set price, which would definitely not 50% of the annual management awards fee to the LLC.
I like your idea but understand that the profit margin for the operator is 1.5% currently while an arrangement like you are talking about would drive a 10-25% margin on those specific scope which would mean more profit for Bechtel. On a lot less management scope.
Example Marie. Billion dollar job equals 100m in profit, minimum. That is more than three years of profit under the current performance.
It is striking how low the fee structure really is. 1.5-2.5%
Marie? Really??
That pipe dream will never happen.
Charlie "GQ" McMillan
January 8, 2016 at 7:32 AM
Sadly, I agree on both of your points. The freezing of the TCP1 pension and the cutting of all benefits that are not iron-clad guarantees is probably in the cards within the near future. NNSA is probably plotting as we speak.
Loyalty? Promises? Pride in America? What's that? It's all about the money these days.
If you don't fight strongly to protect your worker benefits then they *will* be taken away. Plan on it.