How many of you retired because you were just fed up with llnl?
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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On the other hand I was unlucky in that I knew what a great place it USE to be and knew how much the institution had degraded. Politics and Political Correctness had become the primary mover of operations. I left with a bad taste in my mouth and if I had spent another year at 1/2 time, the taste would have been even worse.
And the place nearly killed me. After waking up from emergency surgery I made the decision right there. Final day was last day of the UC contract.
Sounds like sour grapes, I take you that you could not make it as a manager?. The labs are about profit and once your realize this than you can take advantage of the situation and make some good money with little effort. Want to do science, ha ha ha, the labs are not for you.
The Lab that existed when I came here about 25 years ago was about science. Just staying on for about 2 more years to maximize my pension. And, believe it or not, not everyone wants to become a manager. Finally, if you really do want to be a manager then why would you want to work at LLNL or LANL? There are many places the financial and tech industries where one can work as a manager and get much higher pay and benefits.
July 9, 2016 at 9:15 AM
The problem is that those outside jobs requite hard work and skill. At LLNL and LANL management is place to protect your self when you have no real skills, work ethic, or ability.
July 9, 2016 at 9:15 AM
Amen. To paraphrase Groucho, I wouldn't belong to a management team that would have me as a member.
July 9, 2016 at 4:52 PM
There are two types of creatures at the labs, lions and gazelles, or leaders and followers. You can choose to be a gazelle and are free to think that reflects well on you but we all know what lions do to gazelles. Try watching animal planet some time it might help you grow up and see they way the real world works.
July 10, 2016 at 10:34 PM
Don't blame our senior citizens for being in the way of hiring new blood. Blame the management for not having a hiring plan to hire new people. However, my perception within the weapons programs at LANL is that there are virtually no folks left over 60-years old in the program, particularly in weapon engineering.
Then none of them actually ever designed a working weapon !!! Great !
We are in pretty good shape by comparison.
July 12, 2016 at 7:06 PM
You have no idea. Fortunately, they still let Lyle Edwards (Engineering Father of the B61) come in, but I don't think they listen to him. It's all to give the appearance that they have a (one) senior person left who knows anything.
We are in pretty good shape by comparison.
July 12, 2016 at 7:06 PM
They also had talent, can we say the same about the modern workforce?
We are in pretty good shape by comparison.
July 12, 2016 at 7:06 PM
But they had one thing we don't have -- permission to test their weapon designs.
There will come a time when we will return to testing. You heard it here first!
Look around some times. There are many opportunities out there if you are good.
July 15, 2016 at 5:33 PM
The problem is that the quality of the staff has continued to deteriorate. can they really analyze data from previous tests, can they even understand what the codes are doing, DARHT ya right. Sounds good, but without talent all this fairly useless. People are they key to deterrent. LLNS and LANS see no value in people and hence here we are.
Failing either is significant. Failures in stockpile stewardship can be mitigated to a great degree by occasional UG testing and by weapons systems diversification. Failure in intell assessment can be mitigated by effective leadership and by being much bigger and more capable than potential adversaries.
Think ISIS and your next visit to Times Square. Now you get it.
$15B of a $4500 B national budget seems an appropriate allocation for maintaining this mission. $2T ( of about $200 T) has been invested in this important mission in the past 70 years.
Expect the same proportion the next 200 years.
This is a reasonable throwing money at something will do little if you do not have high quality people on the job.
July 15, 2016 at 5:33 PM
We are trying to do much more today, though. In 1945, the goal was, boom, at least once, to achieve more geopolitical than military goals. There was a betting pool before Trinity, with bets starting at zero kt. But we're looking for 10% in aged weapons, or in re-manufactured weapons with new features that have never been tested. And we're comparing much more exquisite data to much more exquisite computer predictions, and trying to quantify margins of uncertainty, all in the absence of any full scale nuclear tests. Hard job, much harder than the job of going boom at least once in 1945. I'm not at all sure the people in 1945 were any better, but they did have the ability to take risks to just get the job done, risks that would be unthinkable today.
????, huh?
I would agree to this as well, the problem is that they are getting fewer in number and we are no longer interested in hiring the best and brightest. Another problem is that some of the people of this caliber that are still at the labs are not very well liked by the current management, this of course makes it even harder to bring in top people. At the end of the day any institution is just the sum of the people that comprise the institution and when you have top people you will have a top institution and converse is also true, have second rate people you will have a second rate institution. You would be hard pressed to find someone who is honest say that quality of LLNL and LANL has not seen a steep decline over the last 15 years. We are taking a big gamble.