Greg Mello posted on this on a local news paper. I would guess that "former" director is Sig Hecker.
LANL should be closed. I have a conversation with a former lab director who told me LANL was (at the time we spoke) twice the size it needed to be for the mission. (Now that would be 3 or even 4 times the size needed, in his very experienced view.) Back in the early 1950s, there were voices in the Atomic Energy Commission which wanted LANL closed, saying LANL was the wrong place for its work.
Until 2018 there was not going to be an industrial pit mission at LANL. NNSA wisely thought it unlikely to succeed, or to succeed for long, and/or would not be cost-effective. That's still true. The dramatic expansion we see at LANL today is the result of a) our NM senators organizing Senate pressure on Trump, who was easy to pressure, and later b) the contractors and a neoconservative cabal in the Pentagon (which Biden has kept intact) blackmailing Trump using Inhofe, Liz Cheney, and others during the second impeachment ("give us a gigantic spending increase, in part to fund two pit factories, or we will have to assume you are a Putin stooge and vote against you").
A man who is now a senior federal nuclear safety official said to me in 2019, "Greg, we all know what is going to happen at LANL. They will go on until they have accidents and incidents that shut them down. We can only hope not too many people will be hurt."
16 comments:
"LANL should be closed. I have a conversation with a former lab director who told me LANL was (at the time we spoke) twice the size it needed to be for the mission. (Now that would be 3 or even 4 times the size needed, in his very experienced view.)"
Why should LANL be closed? As for it is twice the size that needed for the mission that is of course true but Mello forgets to point out that this is true of every government agency. LANL is not unique in this regard look at NASA, NIH, DOE labs, EPA, Eduction, Transportation and so on . You can argue why government agencies are like this. Ironically if LANL is only twice as big as it needs to be it probably still way more efficient that most other government entities.
By the way the same can be said of universities which over the years the amount of faculty relative the number students is constant but the amount of everything else such as admins has more than doubled.
Also Mellow did not mention he did not mention what exactly all these extra people do? If it is the Director I think it is then Mello would not exactly like what he has to say. Basically it is we should just pay more money to a smaller number of better qualified people and we would not only get the same results but probably better results. We all know that such an approach is simply unworkable in a government agency in the Unites States.
The second point that Mello says is that since that time of his discussion
with the old Director the lab is twice has big so it must now be four times larger than needed. Even Mello cannot be that dumb so I will assume is being dishonest. Since that time the labs mission has been expanded to include production work where a certain number of additional people are needed. Since LASG has been going on and on about production it is pretty safe to say that Mellow knows this and why there are now more people. Of course it could still be true that the lab is twice the size as needs to be but it is is certain not four times. It is this dishonesty that makes Mello look so bad. Also it is becoming clear that the LASG is becoming less relevant. There could be many reasons but of the biggest ones is that when Mello says stuff like this can be so easily "fact checked" that even the strongest supports have to have some doubts.
"A man who is now a senior federal nuclear safety official said to me in 2019, "Greg, we all know what is going to happen at LANL. They will go on until they have accidents and incidents that shut them down. We can only hope not too many people will be hurt."
I am bit confused about what this means? Is Mellow implying LANL gets shut down or only the pit production?
I see no path that would ever lead to LANL being shut down. There could be some scenarios that could lead to pit production being shut done but even these are unlikely. First of all production will only be part of the lab mission, the rest of the lab mission stays the same. Even if an accident occurs in production why would you shut down the rest of the lab? This makes no sense and we can even thank Nanos is some way for shutting down the whole lab for a laser incident which has now been realized by literally everyone in DOE to be huge mistake that made no sense and DOE will not allow such sweeping actions again.
Second even if there are accidents and incidents, hints and allegations in the production, that does not mean it would be shut down, it could simply be delayed, parts could be shut down, or perhaps even more money will be out into it. This will be even more true if SR cannot do pit production. There are other possibilities but these are probably unlikely.
One also has to ask just who this senior federal official is? Anyone who has spent anytime in DC knows that these guys will say anything to make themselves seem important or knowledgeable especially to random kiss-ups, reporters, lobbyists and others who hover in DC who are after something. These people will say one thing to one person and then the opposite to someone else. I bet you anything this some guy spewing something off to impress Mello, and Mello being Mello is impressed!!!.
Mind you Mello was impressed by some random idiot in Taos who claims to be an economists I have doubts he is a good judge of if someone is knowledgeable or not.
Again all you have to ask your self is does the claim "all know what is going to happen at LANL. They will go on until they have accidents and incidents that shut them down" Actually make sense? Could you imagine or give the odds of such a case actually occurring? I strongly encourage people to do this for any strong claims anybody makes.
Yellow Mello isn't a serious person and should not be listened to. Just another anti-nuke flake.
If Republicans capture two or three dozen House seats in this fall’s midterm elections, would that constitute a triumph of American fascism? What would it mean for the NNSA labs, would they then be serving fascists? We could be 5 months away from essentially an American version of fascism.
I don’t understand this Mello guy. Where does his hatred come from? I’m a big critic of the NW enterprise but I would never suggest that LANL or any NW lab be shut down, It’s completely unrealistic. Oh, and by the way, if republicans take the house and the senate I can see funding for the NNSA increasing at a rate of 20-30% per year. Los Alamos is going to get really crowded.
The pending defense bill calls for development of a new SLCM, sorely needed to counter China. The Navy needs many more ships than proposed, however. With retirements, the new ships proposed will still result in a smaller fleet. Under 300 ships is not a good defense. Neither is under 500,000 Army troops. This all needs to change.
The pending defense bill calls for development of a new SLCM, sorely needed to counter China. The Navy needs many more ships than proposed, however. With retirements, the new ships proposed will still result in a smaller fleet. Under 300 ships is not a good defense. Neither is under 500,000 Army troops. This all needs to change.
7/12/2022 5:29 PM
Why would anyone want to join the military do defend a quasi racists fascist nation like the United States? Who would want to to be part of that?
7/13/2022 1:08 PM
If you are a US citizen, you shouldn't be. You don't qualify. Please leave immediately.
If you are a US citizen, you shouldn't be. You don't qualify. Please leave immediately.
7/14/2022 7:59 PM
I am a US Citizen and I bet I am way more loyal to the US than people like you. I did not try to overthrow the nation on Jan 6th. I did not try vote and out in a lifelong fascists. I am not trying to prevent millions of people from voting. I am not trying to demonize immigrants. I support defending Ukraine at all costs and want everyone vaccinated to save lives. I do not want our nation to be destroyed by pollution or be taken over by fascists. At the same time it is hard to join the military to defend t 80 million who do not believe in Democracy in the first place. Why would any sane person want to go fight for someone like Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Joe Rogan or Chris Pratt. People who defend Putin, take horse dewormer and spread hate. At least I am educated enough to be realistic to understand why people do not want to joint the modern military. Please go and educate your self on the current state of the the US, stop watching Fox news, stop reading Q, stop listening to Joe Rogan. I know it may be a difficult read by try NYT, listen to NPR, and listen and believe any minorities in your life, listen to women. It is not about you, you do not know better, you had your say for 400 years in the US, let other voices be heard. Do not fear people with a college eduction, you know those college degrees convey real information. Start believing in science FACTS. Next time you go on about masks not working get a CITATION PLEASE or I am not going to take you seriously. In sum I think you are one the one that should not be a US citizen.
7/15/2022 6:52 AM
You think you know a lot about me. You don't. I happen to agree with most of what you said, I am a Trunp-hating moderate conservative, which you apparently can't get your brain around, and I am a scientist. So sorry for your entrenched tribalism. The US is not "fascist" (look up the definition if you need to) - stop the hyperbole if you don't want to be taken as an idiot.
"stop the hyperbole if you don't want to be taken as an idiot.
7/15/2022 5:59 PM"
On the whole poster does sound like idiot, however many of the points made by the poster are held by millions of people.
I don't agree with Mello on much, but I do agree that after the first accident, NNSA will shut down the pit program and never restart it. In fact, I don't think DOE is actually capable of doing any high risk work anymore. Since the Cold War ended, all we do now is sit around and fill out IWDs, take ladder training and worry about whether a static shock needs to be reported to management and ESO and have the program shut down for a month. Its just not the same environment and country it was 30+ years ago. Now we are run by risk management paper pushers, accountants and career non-technical bureaucrats. The weapons mission is like the TSA, its all security theater. We don't test so we can't know. Would you fly in an airplane that had never been tested? Would it even work?
7/15/2022 11:45 PM
That's not point in the poster's favor. It's a condemnation of the educational system in the US, and possibly a sign of overall decline in the IQ of US citizens.
"That's not point in the poster's favor. It's a condemnation of the educational system in the US, and possibly a sign of overall decline in the IQ of US citizens.
7/16/2022 6:19 PM"
I doubt the average US IQ is going down but I think the education system is certainly in decline and dragging many other things down with it. One of my kids teacher was a total activist who never used the text book and just talked about the standard far left talking points of racism being everywhere and how evil capitalism is. What was clear was that this was word for word copies of something he heard elsewhere he had no further analysis of his own and any deviation from these talking points was wrong. There are other teachers just telling the students how smart they are and that parents are all dumb racists and you should hate your family. The latter is like some cult or Mao like approach to society. I am also amazed how little the teachers understand their own subjects.
The other thing is there are way too many people going to college. I can understand the need for STEM degrees but there are huge swaths of people getting degrees in worthless fields which add little in the way in terms of skills and are just propaganda. Do not get me wrong in principle you can gain "critical thinking" skills in rigorous non-STEM fields at certain schools but in practice most schools are just trying to graduate as many students as possible. For a degree in psychology, sociology, political science, English, education, business ,art, and history where with minimal effort one can easily pass. This is on top of the growing number of degrees being given out in various "studies" programs which as far as I can tell have been created so that people who are too dumb to even get a degree in sociology can get still get a college degree in something. These people come out thinking they are "educated" when they cannot think in a logical way, have no ability to understand hypotheticals, nuance or context. They are certainly not coming out with
critical thinking skills. Again if you major in political science at Dartmouth you probably are getting a rigorous education but this only applies for small portion college students. Every place else college is about moving product, students are customers and you need to graduate students to get money and accept as many students as possible. Everyone needs to go to college!!! The realty is only 10 or 15% of people should be going to college. This should be for STEM and or rigorous non-STEM majors. Secretly every professor knows this. If you just go around talking to people the average cab driver seems more intelligent than the average college graduate. It seems like college is either for the smaller number of smart people who need to go to college to gain expertise or to gain technical knowledge or it is for the larger number of below average people or low ambition people who do not want to get a job, start a business or start a family. The latter come out full of propaganda but no ability to think or question. These people think they are now educated so should do what educated people do and listen to NPR, watch CNN or read the NYT. At the same time these institutions need to water down their rigor cater to these people, hence the NYT is no longer the NYT of the 80s, NPR is no longer NPR of early 90s but is now something akin to news for kindergartners. Compare CNN to say ABC of the 70s and so on. You end up dumbing down all the old institutions to crazy levels.
many of the points made by the poster are held by millions of people.
7/15/2022 11:45 PM
And many more millions really believe that the world is flat, and that Trump really won the 2020 election by a landslide.
6:12 is spot on. The difficulties cited are then compounded for the benefit of for-profit corporations like Bechtel.
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