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| | | published Thursday, February 25, 2010 | 189 Views :: 0 Comments |
Livermore Opens Its Doors to Outsiders
Long-Secretive Weapons Labs to Build Energy Research Center Where Government Scientists, Businesses Can Collaborate
By BENJAMIN PIMENTEL Found on WSJ.com; view here. Livermore, home to two major U.S. weapons laboratories, existed as a city of fences and secrets during the Cold War and for years afterward. Now, some of those fences are receding. Both of the city's weapons labs—Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories—are moving forward on plans to build a campus where government scientists and outside researchers can work together on clean-energy technology. ... But the open campus also has attracted critics. Marylia Kelley, of
Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, an advocacy
group long opposed to the labs' nuclear-weapons development, says the
project could be "a green-washing, public-relations move" meant "to
give an imprimatur of environmental responsibility" to what she calls
"the very dirty work of researching and developing new and modified
nuclear bombs."
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| | | published Tuesday, February 02, 2010 | 694 Views :: 0 Comments |
Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2010
By Martin Matishak
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON
-- The Obama administration yesterday unveiled a spending plan that
would increase funding for the U.S. National Nuclear Security
Administration to $11.2 billion in the next fiscal year (see GSN, Jan.
29).
The agency, a semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department, would
receive a 13.4-percent budget increase in fiscal 2011 to maintain the
country's nuclear stockpile and conduct nonproliferation activities
around the globe, according to the White House funding request.
More than $7 billion would be devoted beginning Oct. 1 to "weapons
activities," which ensure the safety and performance of the nation's
atomic stockpile. The amount is a $624 million increase from this year.
Another
$2.7 billion would be funneled to the agency's Defense Nuclear
Nonproliferation program, a hike of 25.8 percent above fiscal 2010.
That effort seeks to secure nuclear materials around the globe that
could be used for weapons and convert them for peaceful purposes.
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| | | published Friday, December 11, 2009 | 1220 Views :: 0 Comments |
Associated Press - December 10, 2009
LIVERMORE, Calif. (AP) - A federal report says improper accounting practices at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory have hidden $80 million in additional costs for a new facility dedicated in May.
The National Ignition Facility studies nuclear fusion, which could provide the country with another clean energy source (sic). The October report by the National Nuclear Security Administration says the facility is not contributing its fair share to the overall running of Lawrence lab in accordance with federal accounting standards. That means other departments have been left to pick up the tab, which amounts to about $80 million in this fiscal year alone.
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| | | published Thursday, December 10, 2009 | 958 Views :: 0 Comments |
December 10, 2009
Originally Appeared here
LIVERMORE – An internal U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) study details how managers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) shifted costs to understate total spending on the controversial National Ignition Facility (NIF) mega-laser. The previously secret document, released today by the nuclear watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs, pegs the current hidden costs of NIF at $80 million annually.
"Livermore Lab is systematically disguising the true costs of the NIF," charged Tri-Valley CAREs' executive director, Marylia Kelley. "When calculated over the life of the project, these hidden costs total more than $2 billion." Kelley continued, "This illegal scheme circumvents the United States Congress, which sets NIF's budget each year, and violates our nation's most basic federal contracting laws."
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| | | published Friday, November 06, 2009 | 2709 Views :: 12 Comments |
Sandia Director Makes $1.7 million
By John Fleck
Thursday, 05 November 2009 19:16
Sandia National Laboratories Director Tom Hunter makes $1.7 million per
year, according to data made public this week.
Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Michael Anastasio makes $800
thousand per year. The numbers became public this week when the labs reported them as one of
the conditions of accepting money under the federal stimulus program.
The compensation triggered outrage from critics of the nuclear weapons
research centers.
Originally Published in the Albuquerque Journal.
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| | | published Tuesday, October 06, 2009 | 942 Views :: 2 Comments |
Nuclear material stockpile dwindling at Livermore lab
By Suzanne Bohan
Contra Costa Times 10/02/2009
Two-thirds of the plutonium and weapons-grade uranium stored at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory has been removed, the agency overseeing the
lab announced this week.
The removal of the "special nuclear material" marks a milestone in the
National Nuclear Security Administration's goal of "denuking" the Livermore
lab by 2012, two years ahead of its original target of 2014. To save costs,
the dangerous radioactive materials will be consolidated at five sites -
none in California - down from 10 sites nationwide listed in a 2007
Government Accountability Office report.
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| | | published Monday, September 14, 2009 | 661 Views :: 1 Comments |
Originally published at
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090910_a_hundred_holocausts_an_insiders_window_into_us_nuclear_policy/
Posted on Sep 10, 2009
By Daniel Ellsberg
Editor’s note: This is the first installment of Daniel Ellsberg’s
personal memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.”
The online book will recount highlights of his six years of research
and consulting for
the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of
nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises.
It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy , which followed the intervening 11 years of his preoccupation with the Vietnam War . Subsequent installments also will appear on Truthdig. The author is a senior fellow of theNuclear Age Peace Foundation .
American Planning for a Hundred Holocausts
One
day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how
our world would end. Not the Earth, not—so far as I knew then—all
humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the
Northern Hemisphere.
What I was handed, in a White House office,
was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was
headed “Top Secret—Sensitive”; under that, “For the President’s Eyes
Only.”
The “Eyes Only” designation meant that, in principle,
it was to be seen and read only by the person to whom it was explicitly
addressed, in this case the president. In practice this usually meant
that it would be seen by one or more secretaries and assistants as
well: a handful of people, sometimes somewhat more, instead of the
scores to hundreds who would normally see copies of a “Top
Secret—Sensitive” document.
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| | | published Friday, September 04, 2009 | 968 Views :: 0 Comments |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 4, 2009
Contact: Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch NM, 505.989.7342, c. 505.920.7118, jay@nukewatch.org
Santa Fe, NM – Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NWNM) has discovered Los Alamos National Laboratory viewgraphs showing that the U.S. nuclear weapons labs want to leverage “stockpile modernization” through formal Safeguards attached to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty during Senate ratification. This modernization would include “large changes” made to existing nuclear weapons refurbished during existing Life Extension Programs, and/or complete “replacement designs” as early as 2015. Congress has rejected funding a new-design “Reliable Replacement Warhead” (RRW) for the last two years, but the labs have clearly not given up. Moreover, there is a danger that the Obama Administration might concede to some form of RRW in order to win the Congressional supermajority of 67 needed to ratify the CTBT. Further, Obama has just reappointed a formerly strong proponent of RRW to again head up the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
A decade ago, under President Clinton, the Senate rejected CTBT ratification. This last April, while declaring that a world free of nuclear weapons is a long term U.S. national security goal, President Obama pledged, “my Administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.” The Treaty’s declared purpose has always been to cut off the advancement of nuclear weapons. But the American labs, now endowed with supercomputer simulated testing, obviously believe that a ban to physical tests no longer blocks the deployment of new nuclear weapons designs. In contrast, they now even seek to enshrine the capability for major modifications and possible new-designs in CTBT Safeguards.
Ratification of the CTBT by the U.S. will be viewed internationally as a concrete sign of America’s commitment to fulfilling the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty’s mandate for nuclear disarmament. CTBT ratification before the May 2010 NPT Review Conference at the United Nations would be a diplomatic victory, if the Obama Administration can win the necessary Senate votes. Ironically, possible CTBT Safeguards enshrining new or heavily modified U.S. weapons designs could derail the strengthening of the global nonproliferation regime by demonstrating to other countries that the U.S. is not really serious about nuclear disarmament.
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| | | published Monday, August 10, 2009 | 1427 Views :: 0 Comments |
LIVERMORE — About 75 protesters gathered at Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory early Thursday to commemorate the Aug. 6, 1945 bombing of
Hiroshima as well as to protest the development and use of nuclear
weapons.
The protest was peaceful but 22 people were arrested by Lawrence
Livermore Lab security for blocking the lab's entrance said Bob
Hirschfeld, a lab spokesman. Those arrested were handcuffed, cited and
released.
Originally published in the Contra Costa Times: http://www.contracostatimes.com/environment/ci_13009155
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| | | published Monday, June 01, 2009 | 1592 Views :: 3 Comments |
World's largest fusion facility today celebrates long, difficult road to
official opening
Contra Costa Times | Bay Area News Group
By Suzanne Bohan
The challenging pursuit of fusion is nothing new to Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory scientists. In the lab's early days in the 1950s, weapons
designers successfully developed the fearsome hydrogen - or fusion - bomb,
many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World
War II. In 1952, the lab joined a program called Project Sherwood that
attempted to control the force of fusion to create a virtually unlimited
source of electrical energy.
Today, the lab enters the newest chapter in its fusion quest with the
official opening of the multipurpose National Ignition Facility, 15
contentious years after the project's approval. The massive, dark building
on the eastern edge of Livermore - not far from hillsides dotted with
grazing cows - covers the footprint of three football stadiums. With 192
lasers, it ranks as the world's largest laser fusion facility.
For more information on the National Ignition Facility, go to http://www.trivalleycares.org/nixnif.htm
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