What percentage of PhDs at LLNL and LANL are routinely doing PhD level work compared to PhDs outside of these Labs?
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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This often happens at the lab, it seems, while it might be true that at least some of the projects and resulting documents are of questionable value or validity, that can be true at the Ph.D. level as well.
Certainly one might imagine by the way, someone without a Ph.D. could do Ph.D. level work, and indeed this must be the case, as all the work that results in a Ph.D. being awarded is usually done by someone without the degree (unless they have one in another field).
I would say at LANL the fraction of Ph.D level kind of work is declining. More and more work seems like 9-5 tech, computer work that someone with a bachelors or masters could easily do. Most of the new hires in my directorate would just need a masters at most and could easily do the job. This has been a gradual shift over the last 10 years. There is also big turnover. They keep reorging hoping it will fix things but the problem is you simply cannot get the people to come here now. The work is not interesting, the pay is not that competitive, and there are many other jobs out there.