The director of the Los Alamos National Lab is stepping down after some problems in lab management. UC plays a significant role in the management of the lab - with a history going back to the Manhattan Project. The management contract is up for rebidding by the Dept. of Energy. Yours truly hasn't reviewed the Regents recording of the lab review at the recent meeting to know if there was discussion of this issue. But in 2018, there will be a decision of the Dept. of Energy on who will do the managing in the future. The politics of this matter are evident, given California's policies on immigration, climate change, etc.
The director of Los Alamos National Laboratory has told employees there that he will retire at the end of 2017, eight months before the private contractor he leads is scheduled to be displaced as the laboratory’s manager.
The announcement on Tuesday follows years of costly turmoil at the nuclear weapons facility and comes on the heels of the Center for Public Integrity’s disclosure in June and August of harrowing safety incidents and other snafus there during McMillan’s tenure.
A laboratory press release about McMillan’s announcement did not say why he was resigning after 6 years as director, ahead of next year’s unusual handover of the lab by his consortium to another group of private companies, still not yet chosen by the Department of Energy. A spokesman for the laboratory, Kevin Roark, declined to elaborate.
But the Center’s articles about the laboratory’s troubles had attracted the concern of Washington lawmakers and the mishaps at the lab had angered senior officials at the Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a unit of the department that directly oversees the lab’s work...
No comments:
Post a Comment