Hazel O'Leary redux.
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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It is a bit of a odd choice. The claim is that she worked a lot with the auto industry and electric cars. It seems like they have no idea that more than half the DOE is nuclear weapons. The renewable energy push will be big of course but I have no idea how nuclear weapons will do under her.
To be fair to her Trump first choice for the Doe was Rick Perry another governor who did not even know what the DOE was. He was fine but he was probably pro nuclear weapons. From what I keep hearing is that Biden wants to reduce funding for NWs.
Lots of ways this could turn out.
(1) Not much changes if the Senate remains red. Come 2022 that could change
(2) Not much changes even if Senate turns blue because the majority will simply not be big enough.
Or that Harris/Biden will simply not want significant cuts.
(3) Harris/Biden want cuts and the house and the Senate say yes for cuts. This is more likely in after 2022 but who knows.
The latter mostly likely means that layoffs will be coming. The labs have hired a large number of people so once things get tight they are going to get really tight. Again who knows under Obama things seemed pretty stable. There was a layoff at LLNL and separation packages at LANL but this was really independent of the Obama administration and was out into motion during the Bush years.
I think the bottom line is that not much is very clear. I suppose you could have crazy DOE head who will put forth bizarre policies like what happened in the 90s but even than these people do not last all that long.
On the scale of Rick Perry to Moniz/Chu, Granholm is somewhere in the middle.
Dems are also visibly pro-science. Even if the weapons program takes a hit, the labs will be supported.
Granholm is not "on the bright side." Pretty dim, actually.