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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But seriously, this was an EERE call and it went to the usual DOE Office of Science suspects. Not an area LANL nor LLNL are competitive in -- by design.
NNSA does bombs not batteries. Not hard to understand.
I doubt DOE wants to pay the 800% overheard to make battery which could be done cheaper and better elsewhere. Unless it is bombs we do need it, cannot do it, and do not want it. LLNL will be closed at some point anyway, LANL is going to become a pit manufacturing plant. Sandia which is the one good lab in the NSF system will be more than capable of doing what little science and tech that needs to be done. Ok this was a bit exagerated but such points are often raised at the labs.
The more relevant reason is the legacy of Nanos will always taint the labs when it comes to BES, DOE and WFO work in that most of these places could think why should we send money to place that could be stood down at any second for whatever reason. You never hear about all of Argonne being "stood down" for 8 months, or all of Harvard being "stood down". Trust me I know a few DOE people and they always say that the NNSA labs are a concern due to possible crazy stuff like the whole thing being shut down. Working with the NNSA labs can be risky. If you where at DOE and wanted give some money to a lab would you rather give it ORNL, ANL or LANL? One costs a lot more, has more risk, not to mention the quality of the science has been declining. You see what I mean. In 1999 LANL was considered the top lab in the entire DOE complex when you counted publications per year. Now it is 5th behind, LBNL, ORNL, ANL, and BNL. The only other lab to show a similar decline was LLNL, as LANL has has about 3 times more publications than LLNL.
In fact I would guess DOE would rather not give any non NNSA money to the NNSA labs but are sort of forced to at this point. In the past they would more than happy to do so as these labs used to have some of the very best science in the world, could do things that could never be done elsewhere and where happy to do it. This is no longer the case.