Will employees at LANL attempt to identify and communicate principle RFP criteria for the 2017 LANL contract, or sit on the sidelines and hope for the best? Guess what the self-proclaimed "lions" and "winners" want to happen?
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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February 23, 2016 at 9:06 AM
Amazing how some people still don't get it. "LANL" does not have a mission (in fact it doesn't actually exist as anything except a collection of buildings and facilities). DOE/NNSA has a mission and pays LANS to carry it out at the LANL site.
February 23, 2016 at 9:37 AM
The view of the world according to the admirals, lawyers and bean counters at the NNSA. They have Billions of Dollars and a Mission. All they need is to find some contractors-for-hire to do the menial work of putting things together. A dangerous delusion divorced from reality.
Question to these admirals. Let's say NNSA is disbanded tomorrow; with that parasitic entity gone, would the mission work still get done? Yes, and the productivity would actually skyrocket. Now, let's reverse the situation. Imagine the National Labs are disbanded. What would the thousands of "overseers" with no qualifications accomplish on their own?
The notion that NNSA doesn't have to sell anything is an example of delusional arrogance. In reality, this is an organization that should be very worried about its own existence. And when it is eliminated, the mission work at the labs will continue. Just as it did for decades before NNSA was conjured up.
Why is it necessary to have thousands upon thousands of technically unqualified people to guarantee that the labs are making optimal use of the taxpayer resources? How do these people "oversee" something they can't understand? For years, LANS has been feeding them Powerpoint Baloney, which they gladly swallowed and rewarded LANS with stellar scores.
Then ask yourself: who oversees the overseers? If you start with the premise that scientists and engineers cannot be trusted, why should you trust NNSA apparatchiks, Tom or Linton? How do you know they don't make awful decisions that lead to severe degradation of the capabilities of the NW complex? Another layer of overseers? You pretty quickly get into an infinite loop, with the resulting runaway explosion of bureaucracy.
Let's put it another way. Recall how much was accomplished during the Manhattan project in just a few years. Can you see anything comparable accomplished in today's complex? No, you say? But how come? Unlike then, we now have thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats, to ensure "performance" and "accountability", shouldn't that make it all better?
February 26, 2016 at 9:37 AM
Um, because the world is different now? I prefer my pie-in-the-sky served with a slight sprinkling of reality.
Let the floggings continue until morale improves.