Detailed LA Times on testing legacy issues in the Marshall Islands

Detailed Los Angeles Times story on testing legacy issues in the Marshall Islands, it includes interviews with staff from DOE and LLNL.

"Five thousand miles west of Los Angeles and 500 miles north of the equator, on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide.

Here in the Marshall Islands, Runit Dome holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet — or 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools — of U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium. Nowhere else has the United States saddled another country with so much of its nuclear waste, a product of its Cold War atomic testing program.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs on, in and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its shallow lagoons and exiling hundreds of people from their homes.

U.S. authorities later cleaned up contaminated soil on Enewetak Atoll, where the United States not only detonated the bulk of its weapons tests but, as The Times has learned, also conducted a dozen biological weapons tests and dumped 130 tons of soil from an irradiated Nevada testing site. It then deposited the atoll’s most lethal debris and soil into the dome.

Now the concrete coffin, which locals call “the Tomb,” is at risk of collapsing from rising seas and other effects of climate change. Tides are creeping up its sides, advancing higher every year as distant glaciers melt and ocean waters rise.

Officials in the Marshall Islands have lobbied the U.S. government for help, but American officials have declined, saying the dome is on Marshallese land and therefore the responsibility of the Marshallese government...

Over the last 15 months, a reporting team from the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism made five trips to the Marshall Islands, where they documented extensive coral bleaching, fish kills and algae blooms — as well as major disease outbreaks, including the nation’s largest recorded epidemic of dengue fever. They interviewed folk singers who lost their voices to thyroid cancers and spent time in Arkansas, Washington and Oregon, where tens of thousands of Marshallese have migrated to escape poverty and an uncertain future.

Marshallese leaders acknowledge that America doesn’t bear full responsibility for their nation’s distress. But they say the United States has failed to take ownership of the environmental catastrophe it left behind, and they claim U.S. authorities have repeatedly deceived them about the magnitude and extent of that devastation."

https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-testing-sea-level-rise/#nt=liA4promoSmall-1col-7030col1-mainnt=liG0promoMedium-7030col1-main

Guard Accused Colleagues of Sexual Assault Fired

"A Nuclear Site Guard Accused Colleagues of Sexual Assault. Then She Was Fired"

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/us/politics/department-of-energy-sexual-assault.html

Settled sexual assault claims

Former Nevada Site Security Officer Settles Sexual Assault Claims Against Contractor"

https://www.exchangemonitor.com/former-nevada-site-security-officer-settling-sexual-assault-claims-centerra/?printmode=1

No-rehire list?

Anybody in HR....uhhhh....Strategic Human Resources Management (man we're pretentious) ever here about a "no rehire" list?

Who will replace Younger at SNL?

Steve Younger announced his retirement as Director of SNL months ago 

https://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/news/2019/08/27/sandia-labs-director-stephen-younger-to-retire.html

 Who will replace him? Will Honeywell promote from within as they did for their second Deputy Director? Will LLNL lose another weapons manager? Will an ex-LANS person show up again or someone recycled from NNSA? Maybe another Navy Admiral? Does it really matter?

Recruiting and Outreach at the Nation’s Largest American Indian College and Career Fair

LLNS Engineering Superintendent Randy Pico attends 2019 "National American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) Conference" Great for STEM and all under represented minorities!

https://www.energy.gov/lm/articles/recruiting-and-outreach-nation-s-largest-american-indian-college-and-career-fair

LANL receives $5 billion

LANL receives $5 billion to upgrade aging facilities

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/lanl-receives-billion-to-upgrade-aging-facilities/article_417d159e-90b3-5e6f-85cf-696573310df3.html