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| Layoffs at nuke lab stir fears of a brain drain |
| 2008-06-04 |
| Maybe this should go under "Idiot of the Day", but it's Congress, which is composed of idiots rather than being an idiot in and of itself. The nation's top nuclear weapons design lab has laid off hundreds of workers, raising concerns about a brain drain and stirring fears that some of these highly specialized scientists will sell their expertise to foreign governments, perhaps hostile ones. Because of budget cuts and higher costs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory laid off 440 employees May 22 and 23. Over the past 2 1/2 years, attrition and layoffs have reduced the work force of 8,000 by about 1,800 altogether. According to a list obtained by The Associated Press, about 60 of the recently laid-off workers were engineers, around 30 were physicists and about 15 were chemists. Some, but not all, were involved in nuclear weapons work or nonproliferation efforts, and all had put in at least 20 years at the lab. Some lawmakers and others said they fear the loss of important institutional knowledge about designing warheads and detecting whether other countries are going nuclear. Also, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the layoffs at Lawrence Livermore and two other big U.S. weapons labs represent "a national security danger point." These unemployed experts might take their skills overseas, Feinstein said. "The fact is, these are all people who are human — they have homes, they have families, they have educations to pay for," she said. "And I very much worry where they go for their next job." The possibility is also on the mind of the nation's top nuclear weapons official, National Nuclear Security Administration chief Tom D'Agostino. "Always in a situation where people leave under less-than-ideal circumstances, we worry about that, and it's something I assure you we're looking at closely," D'Agostino said. "I'm always concerned about the counterintelligence part of our mission, and we have an active program to go make sure we understand where we're vulnerable and where we're not." Asked to elaborate, NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said the agency is "always on guard for foreign entities approaching our employees, active or retired, but it's their responsibility to alert us to those circumstances." The NNSA is aware of no instance in which a U.S. nuclear weapons scientist had gone to work overseas, he said. He said the agency regards the possibility of a hostile government picking up laid-off workers as "highly unlikely," in part because these are American citizens who have responsibly held high-level clearances for many years, and because federal law provide stiff penalties — which range as high as life in prison — for divulging nuclear secrets. In an e-mail message, Wilkes said the very notion that these scientists would sell their country out is "an insult to their personal integrity and their patriotism." Ken Sale, a physicist laid off from Lawrence Livermore on May 23, said that taking his knowledge of nuclear weapons overseas would be unthinkable, and that he knows of no laid-off colleague who would even consider it. But "the recent history of spying has all been money-based," Sale said. "Being concerned about expertise you wouldn't want rattling around in the whole world, and workers being desperate for a job, is a reasonable concern." Sale worked on nuclear weapons testing, nonproliferation and nuclear-detection projects."The specific experience you get doing that stuff doesn't have applications outside that narrow world," he said. "It's not obvious that I will be able to be fully employed." Sale, 51, will receive one week's pay for each of his 23 years at the lab, which is in Livermore, about 50 miles from San Francisco. For security reasons, laid-off workers like Sale immediately lost their access badges, their top-secret "Q" clearances were suspended, and they were promptly escorted off the grounds. Some, including Sale, may stay on for a few months doing unclassified work via telecommuting. Lawmakers and others have expressed concern that wave after wave of work force reductions will diminish the lab's expertise. D'Agostino said he could not guarantee that national security would not be harmed. With a self-imposed nuclear test ban in place since 1992, maintenance of the warhead stockpile — Lawrence Livermore's top responsibility — is performed on supercomputers. So is the task of designing a new generation of warhead, which Lawrence Livermore won the right to do last year. The layoffs have reduced the lab's roster of experts with invaluable experience they had gleaned from taking part in actual nuclear tests, Sale and others said. "Designing, building and seeing a device go off is very different from designing a device and handing it to a computer jockey," Sale said. Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney, whose district includes part of the lab, said the stakes are especially high as the United States tries to divine through science what other countries are doing inside their weapons programs. "We need to be able to understand what the clues are about other countries such as Iran and North Korea and other countries that are potential nuclear weapons developers," he said. "Without those scientists that have been involved in that field for years, for decades, it's going to be a lot more difficult to know what's going on elsewhere in the world." Los Alamos, the New Mexico laboratory that built the atom bomb during World War II, cut its work force last year by about 550 through retirements and attrition, and Sandia, also largely in New Mexico, plans to shed dozens of workers. Congress cut $100 million from Lawrence Livermore's budget in the fiscal 2008 budget, and the lab has been hit with an additional $180 million in unexpected costs from its transfer last year to a new management company, lab spokeswoman Susan Houghton said. |
| Posted by:gorb |
| #12 ION REDDIT > EUROPE ON NUCLEAR ALERT AFTER SLOVENIA REACTOR LEAK.; + RUSSIA TODAY > FEMALE EXODUS [educated/professn]LEAVES EAST GERMAN MEN ANGRY + ARE SIBERIAN KIDS DYING FROM A CHINESE VIRUS [Abakhan, RFE]. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2008-06-04 22:45 |
| #11 their |
| Posted by: Sninert Black9312 2008-06-04 17:42 |
| #10 grom - If your comment is sarcasm implying that they left the supporting staff and cut the scientists then I am amused. Otherwise, I stand by my point - there would be few scientists foolish enough to turn traitor and provide the very ammunition which would assure the destruction of thier grandchildren. If we actually had a representative government, those few would be easy enough to monitor and expose. |
| Posted by: Sninert Black9312 2008-06-04 17:41 |
| #9 #1: Congress is moaning but Congress cut their budget. You can't have it both ways. Sure they can, just find someone else to blame, and lie. (Of course) |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2008-06-04 16:16 |
| #8 stirring fears that some of these highly specialized scientists will sell their expertise to foreign governments, perhaps hostile ones. Thats the MSM and Dems/Congress projecting their own ethics onto the situation. they'd sell out easily so they believe the scientists would too. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2008-06-04 09:44 |
| #7 Ah.. Feinstein... figures... |
| Posted by: john frum 2008-06-04 09:12 |
| #6 stirring fears that some of these highly specialized scientists will sell their expertise to foreign governments, perhaps hostile ones. fer gawd sakes... fears in whom? The MSM "world citizens" who have no allegiance to any country? |
| Posted by: john frum 2008-06-04 09:08 |
| #5 The Labs (Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, and Argonne) were created to support DoD. Since paying far less than competitive salaries in Civil Service pay, the labs were some of the original 'outsourcing' nearly all to universities to operate and staff at market pay scales. That was when we had an Army, just a part of DoD, of over a million. We've watched the Army cut to under a million to just under 800,000 by the early 90s and finally to under 500,000 by 2000. Meantime these labs have been largely immune from similar cuts as their very reason to exist has diminished. There's been a lot of creative attempts to keep them going. Basically its welfare for the gifted. The entire program is now amok in political sustainment detached from mission. Functions and mission need to be consolidated and scaled appropriately. One if not two probably needs to be phased out completely. I'd nominate the Los Alamos site just based upon the culture that has devolved that has created far too many security lapses. The facility could retain its secondary mission which is storage of materials awaiting the Yucca Mountain completion, but the entire R&D needs adult supervision elsewhere. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-06-04 09:04 |
| #4 how many of those layoffs are administrators and supporting staff? You don't have much experience with large organizations, do you Sninert Black9312? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2008-06-04 06:30 |
| #3 This is crap. How many natural American citizens do you personally know who would sell their expertise to Iran or other hostile countries? Besides, how many of those layoffs are administrators and supporting staff? If we actually had a government that represented our interests, I doubt it would be all that hard for them to keep tabs on the scientists who might become traitors. This just sounds like another scare piece that allows politicians to stick their hands in our pockets- once again. |
| Posted by: Sninert Black9312 2008-06-04 05:08 |
| #2 Sheer insanity! |
| Posted by: Spike Uniter 2008-06-04 04:39 |
| #1 Congress is moaning but Congress cut their budget. You can't have it both ways. California's Senators and many of it's Congressmen are worthless to Californians and California's economy. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2008-06-04 03:57 |