Actual post from Dec. 15 from one of the streams. This is a real topic. As far as promoting women and minorities even if their qualifications are not as good as the white male scientists, I am all for it. We need diversity at the lab and if that is what it takes, so be it. Quit your whining. Look around the lab, what do you see? White male geezers. How many African Americans do you see at the lab? Virtually none. LLNL is one of the MOST undiverse places you will see. Face it folks, LLNL is an institution of white male privilege and they don't want to give up their privileged positions. California, a state of majority Hispanics has the "crown jewel" LLNL nestled in the middle of it with very FEW Hispanics at all!
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I was at this all star 2009 NIF
dedication. I call BS on your statement. So much so, that Senator Diane Feinstein called for a major LLNS annual award fee cut and contract extension termination when NIF FAILED reach ignition in 2012. But the “good ol’ boys” at the NNSA decided to extend the LLNS contact anyway. Soon after, Ed and Parney left LLNL.
2009 Diane Feinstein at the NIF Dedication
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gEuJ4vAmWJ8&pp=ygUYMjAwOSBuaWYgbGl2ZXRtb3JlIGRpYW5l
If you don't like it, then let the labs go back to testing.
Two LLNL projects that overlapped in time, NIF and LIFE
from Wikipedia:
“LIFE, short for Laser Inertial Fusion Energy, was a fusion energy effort run at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory between 2008 and 2013…
LIFE used the same basic concepts as NIF…but aimed to lower costs using mass-produced fuel elements, simplified maintenance, and diode lasers with higher electrical efficiency…Through 2011 and into 2012, NIF ran the "national ignition campaign"…NIF failed in this goal, with fusion performance that was well below ignition levels and differing considerably from predictions. With the problem of ignition unsolved, the LIFE project was canceled in 2013.”
While scientific discovery during that time period lead to commercial power plants in the 1950’s. What was detonated in New Mexico and later Japan were vastly different in many respects than any commercial nuclear power plant. Likewise anyone that knows anything about NIF target design and the physics of the widely published Teller Ulam design would understand what is being tested. In both cases a one time extreme event vs a controlled continuous chain reaction that must last decades.
As written above on 6/04 if you don’t like it… cool let’s pull out the oldest pit out of the stockpile and the newest one from LANL and make a few new holes in the ground at area 19. I can think of a few side tests that would go right beside these tests if we were to go back to that type of testing.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/usa-nuclear-power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Electrical_Generation_1950-2016.png
Like what was written above… none of that has any resemblance of what came out of the manhattan project and likewise getting back to the original point of this thread I know it’s hard for you folks to stay on topic. A commercial fusion power plant will look nothing like what is being done at NIF additionally in terms of stockpile stewardship at this point in time this is the only device that can come close to the localized energy to perform EOS experiments to verify that the models are correct. The funny thing is since ignition has been achieved the only people talking about commercial electric power generation are the folks in New Mexico….