LANL had DuPont safety culture survey. The results were a total disaster for LANL. It is scored on 0 to 100, and LANL got 54. LANL falls in the "dependent" safety culture zone which not a good position.
Dependent Stage
The Dependent Stage is the second level of the Bradley Curve, where workers comply with directives from management about policies and practices. Safety awareness and training have increased, but motivation comes from outside sources such as management pressure. Although fewer, accidents are still thought to be inevitable.
Employee ownership of safety measures is limited at this point, despite a heightened awareness of safety hazards. They don’t follow policies or processes because they wish to; they do so because they feel they have to. There’s little to no effort to enhance the current quo of safety. Instead, employees might consider that solely the role of upper management. It would be uncommon for employees to ask for criticism or opportunities for improvement since they consider accidents as isolated incidents or bad luck.
6 comments:
Safety is a bureaucratic farce at LANL, the ultimate work free safe zone.
Let's say you bring in $3M for a new program. $2.5M of that goes to overhead and you have $500K remaining to get stuff done. Then you try to do some work, but that requires support organizations like craft, facilities, procurement, engineering or waste to assist. They ask you for a charge code, thus taking an additional $250K to do jobs that should already be covered under overhead. Now you are left with about $250K to do the actual R&D. As a result, you have two choices. You can do very little and let the project end in failure. Or you can violate the safety rules and try to make some progress, maybe get fired too. Neither are good options.
Here is another example. You are doing some important national security R&D and the NNSA has given you deadlines when the funding cuts off. Unfortunately, since the facilities are very old, the 208V circuit to your equipment suffers a fault. No problem, you contact building management and they say, yes we can fix it, give us about 3 years to replace and upgrade this old panel. Ok, now you have a decision to make. Let the program fail and the funding go to waste, maybe get fired since your work goes nowhere. Or you can take your chances, put a bubblegum wrapper in the 1950s fuse slot and probably finish before anybody notices. There is also some small chance it will blow up and cause a safety incident. Neither is a good option.
But suppose you have 3 million dollars and were able to employ it at a 10% rate of return, while government borrowing costs less than 5%. This would not be hard by investing in something like Berkshire Hathaway if the market does well. With the resulting $150,000 a year which would continue to perpetuity, you could produce 10,000 papers a year using the new automated programs to produce scientific work. This amounts to one scientific or engineering paper every 52 minutes, the quality of which would increase over time while they would be delivered at an ever-increasing rate, working day and night to build upon previous research results.
As for safety there will be less issues related to human harm once all humans are removed from the process, in fact someday we can transfer all humans into the metaverse, which will run on redundant computers deep underground, of course.
Meanwhile of course, the government's investment in Berkshire would no doubt skyrocket as well, as they would employ AI advances to downsize labor costs while enhancing productivity. As humans are transferred into the metaverse, their earthly assets and resources could be used to promote the economy even more!
It is amazing that the DuPont survey uses the idea that safety-related accidents can be reduced to zero as a measure of the success of the safety culture. No serious scientist believes that the probability of a random event is zero. Yet, here we are, being preached to by wannabees.
8/14/2024 8:12 PM, no you are wrong, you cowboy. NNSA has already found the secret to eliminate all accidents with probability of one: terminate all work and the safety incident rate will go to zero. It's people like you who are fighting the system in the name of science and some bizarre ethical need to do work in exchange for a paycheck that have thwarted the governments efforts.
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