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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"In contrast, many self-assessments used flawed and inconsistent methodologies and overstated the openness of the environment.
DOE has infrequently used its enforcement authority to hold contractors accountable for unlawful retaliation, issuing two violation notices in the past 20 years.
DOE officials provided GAO with examples where (1) little or nothing was done in response to intimidation of contractor employees who report safety and other concerns; (2) a subcontractor was terminated after reporting safety concerns; and (3) a contractor employee was terminated allegedly because she cooperated with GAO. DOE’s reluctance to hold contractors accountable may diminish contractor employee confidence in
mechanisms for raising concerns and seeking whistleblower protection."
Ya think?
"...a DOE contracting officer said that DOE manages the contractor, not its employees; therefore until a retaliation issue becomes a lawsuit DOE relies on the contractor to remedy the issue. However, this runs counter to DOE's Integrated Safety Management policy, which states that contractors will be held accountable for safety performance, to include fostering an environment free of retaliation."
Once a "retaliation issue" becomes a lawsuit, DOE bankrolls the contractor's litigation costs even when the contractor may have failed in the area of "safety performance" and failed to "foster an environment free of retaliation".
https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/07/18/19976/nuclear-weapons-contractors-repeatedly-stifle-whistleblowers-auditors-say
“Our problems are with the way [the Energy Department] allows the contractors basically to self-assess how open their environment is,” Diane LoFaro, the assistant team leader for the GAO’s investigation, told The Center for Public Integrity in an interview. “Our recommendation is that those assessments need to be independent. The contractor should not be assessing themselves. The DOE should be assessing the contractors’ cultures.”
"The problems run deeper than self-regulation, the report states. When contractor employees have brought concerns directly to the Energy Department, partly out of fear of retaliation by their bosses, the department has often referred those complaints back to the contractor, potentially jeopardizing the complainer’s anonymity or creating the appearance of “impaired independence” at DOE."
When a DOE contractor claims past employee whistleblower cases have been "adjudicated" by DOE, now you know that really means an assessment and judgement by the contractor in question passed back to DOE.
How is this not fraud?