The American Physical Society only gave two Fellows to LANL this year. 10-15 years the lab would get seven to ten every year. About a month ago one of the lab senior scientists gave a report about the declining number publications at LANL. The trend started around 2006. Before that LANL was the top publishing lab in the DOE system now it has fallen behind LBNL, ORNL, ANL and soon it will be behind PNNL. Another point is that number people at LANL has also grown in terms of people who could publish.
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The elephant in the room is the simple fact that Pete Nanos transformed the Laboratory culture from one where science was at the center to one where Washington politics is at the center. The fallout was and is as predictable as the sun coming up.
From 1943 until 2003, the Laboratory management would say things like, “we will have the fastest computers…the best scientists…the largest accelerators…the finest machine shops etc in the world”, and we did! Now they half-heartedly say, “we will be among the best…”. in all those things, but nobody really believes it because we are rarely in the top 10. Like it or not, Nanos, for-profit management, and Washington bureaucrats have ruined the Labs. They cannot recover.
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