LLNL - The True Story -

SNL wins 5 R&D100 awards PNNL wins 5 LANL only gets 1 The quality is on display.   Anonymous  said... How about LLNL and LBNL? November 20, 2015 at 3:36 PM      Anonymous  said... LLNL wins 3 November 20, 2015 at 5:58 PM     Anonymous  said...   LANL is reduced to software? Experimental hardware gone bye -bye? Well, I guess it's easier that way. November 20, 2015 at 8:14 PM     Anonymous  said... R&D100 are pure BS. I got one of these and they are worth shit. LANL did not even want me to go the award ceremony. Waste of tax payers money, they said. So if the other labs want to showcase how they waste taxpayers money, shame on them.

 Jautaikis announces he's retiring, the board knights Deeney as the new president, Jautaikis changes his mind because of "unforeseen circumstances", Deeney evaporates, and Holt is named acting president with no mention of Deeney. Were there trips with Chinese postdocs in Deeney's past? Does he not have a PhD after all?

Management at LANL and allocation of funding. where did funding for FY16 go? internal funding disputes?

A Bit of Humor: At LANL we are having our annual Holiday gift basket auction. One of the premier items available for bidding is a signed photograph of Charlie "AWESOME" McMillan.

Empyrean - Wait For It If you call them 844-750-5567 to adjust your retiree health benefits, be prepared to wait. Their Automated Insolence recording assures you that your estimated wait is About 2 minutes, but it really took about 40 minutes just to talk to someone. Q> Does anyone know if their website is any better? Q> Was this toll free? Anonymous said... The Empyrean website is pretty easy to navigate. The biggest stink I have heard was at last year's open enrollment with people griping about the username that is assigned. After the OPM hack, I am not losing sleep over the website username issue. Is their phone service toll free - no idea, I used the website from the start.

What mission path is NIF on now and what will the funding and staffing levels look like in 12-24 months?

Time Magazine Fusion Article There is an excellent article inside and on the cover of the Time Magazine publication dated November 2, 2015 dealing with how various FUSION projects are going. The major focus of the article concerns an Orange Country California company called Tri Alpha. Most FUSION projects are using a combination of Hydrogen Isotopes named Deuterium and Tritium as fuel to use in their reactors. The upside to using these as fuels is that they will fuse at low temperatures. Making things easier. However, this produces radiation and you have to heat steam, that turns turbines to produce electricity. With Tri Alpha's approach, they use Hydrogen and Boron as fuel. This is called Aneutronic Fusion as little or no neutrons are produced in the reaction. The neutrons carry radiation. There are two advantages to this, there is very little radiation, and electricity is produced in the reaction itself, not needing to heat steam and turn turbines. Some naysayers say that the 3 ...

Joint Accident Investigation Team (JAIT) Report of the 5-3-15 Arc-Flash Accident at LANL https://engineering.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/efcog/7_9_15_TA_53_FinalReport.pdf

Whatever happened with the Los Alamos guard contract dispute? Did Wackenhut win it, or did SOC keep it after their protest?

Your highly dysfunctional federal government at its very worst as shown below. And to think, this massive hack involved all your clearance data and your biometric data, too. And the data for your relatives. Nothing but silence from the OPM, though, with no help for those who have been compromised. Imagine if some business was hacked and responded this slowly to the compromised data of their customers. *** Three-quarters of U.S. OPM hack victims still in dark - Reuters, Nov 3rd, 2015 *** WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fewer than a quarter of 21 million federal workers hit by a major computer hack have been officially told that their personal information was compromised, six months after the breach was detected, a U.S. government official said on Tuesday. About 5 million notifications about the hack have been sent out so far, a spokesperson for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) told Reuters in an email. The slowness of the notification process underscores Washington's struggles i...

Area G – Safety Basis: On Monday, Area G personnel conducted a fact-finding after they determined that material-at-risk values for certain types of nitrate salt wastes may be underreported by a factor of as much as 10. Personnel determined that the historical data from the Plutonium Facility relied on safeguards values that did not accurately reflect the content of americium-241. Area G personnel are assessing the implications for the safety basis and are reviewing the extent of condition for other waste streams that may have elevated americium content. http://www.dnfsb.gov/sites/default/files/Board%20Activities/Reports/Site%20Rep%20Weekly%20Reports/Los%20Alamos%20National%20Laboratory/2015/wr_20151002_65.pdf

October 26, 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Enterprise Assessments’ Office of Enforcement issued an Enforcement Letter (NEL-2015-03) to Sandia Corporation relating to the loss of an ionizer containing a radioactive source that was on lease to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sandia National Laboratories." http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/10/f27/Sandia%20Enforcement%20Letter%20NEL-2015-03.pdf

Just give them a larger share of the federal budget and stop asking them so often what they are doing with the money. Sounds like another superbly conducted congressional study. http://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/102815-Glauthier-and-Cohon-Testimony.pdf

Did performance failures associated with the near fatal electrical incident at LANSCE this year constitute a significant or “First Degree” performance failure with respect to the contract’s Environmental, Safety and Health terms and conditions? 

A complimentary article on the CBT and Stockpile Stewardship: http://thebulletin.org/new-push-comprehensive-nuclear-test-ban-treaty8830 But with this comment on NIF: One would never have known that the cornerstone of stockpile stewardship, Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility, came in more than 300 percent over budget, five years behind schedule, and has still failed to achieve its promised goal of “ignition” (the point where more energy comes out of a fusion reaction than goes in).