Dec 17, 2009

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin


For me, the handwriting has been on the wall since December, 2005 when D'Agostino announced that LANS had been awarded the LANL contract. The recent LANL Performance Review demonstrating that NNSA is extremely happy with LANS' performance is just one more bit of validation that LANL is on a carefully charted course, no variations wanted nor expected.

Enjoy the trip!

--Doug


PS: Sorry to have interrupted your deep, meaningful conversations about snow removal, please continue...


2009 performance review gives LANS, LLC 90% of available award fee and another year to contract term
By comparison, the award fee for FY08 was 88% and 81% for FY07.

The National Nuclear Security Administration has evaluated the Laboratory’s performance for fiscal year 2009 and awarded LANS, LLC 90% of the available award fee and added another year to the term of the LANS contract to manage and operate Los Alamos National Laboratory. That extension stretches the contract term through September 30, 2015. By comparison, the award fee for FY08 was 88% and 81% for FY07.

NNSA cited its “very high expectations” and noted significant progress in the Lab’s performance overall, especially in achieving its mission and delivering on program assignments.

“Thank you for your continued hard work and dedication to continuous improvement,” said Lab Director Michael Anastasio.

Anastasio noted that many accomplishments throughout the Laboratory contributed to this encouraging customer assessment, including substantially completing construction of the RLUOB facility as part of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement project, the use of the Roadrunner supercomputer, and the accelerated shipment offsite of transuranic waste.

“We’re proud that this year's assessment continues our upward trend,” said Ike Richardson, deputy director. “NNSA’s view of our work is a tribute to the LANL team's continued efforts to enhance discovery science as well as productivity.”

SUMMARY OF FY2009 LANS AWARD FEE DETERMINATION
Los Alamos National Security, LLC
Manager and operator of Los Alamos National Laboratory

Total available fee: $80.2 million
Earned “fee at risk,” or incentive fee: 84%, or $43.3 million
Portion earned of overall fee: 90%, or $72.1 million
(includes fee at risk, fixed fee, work for others):

18 comments:

  1. Conclusion: neither deep, meaningful conversations about snow removal, nor abysmal survey results, nor this blog has changed anything for the better.
    Nevertheless, I continue to "enjoy" reading the latter.

    SSPed

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  2. Excuse me while I go back to chewing my cud.

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  3. Regardless of this decision, no one survives in the nuclear weapon business, no one, from top to bottom. Never has, never will.

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  4. Ok, so I muddled my way through one project this year, failed to pass my piss-in-a-cup test twice, and only got caught snoozing every once in awhile. That's gotta mean I'm gonna get one mighty nice bonus check this year!

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  5. 5:04,

    PBI's Baby! Don't get in the way of those, and you're golden.

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  6. What's the matter Doug... all this positive news ruining your agenda?

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  7. Not at all. Happy to publish it all.

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  8. 7:22 You have a warped sense of reality. Are you Tom D'Agostino or just another Bechtel plant wandering through Northern New Mexico?

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  9. Set the bar low enough and get the gold (wink, wink). That's the DOE Olympics for ya!

    -Sarah P.

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  10. December 16, 2009

    Secretary Chu Announces 2009 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award Winners

    Washington, DC – US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced today the winners of the 2009 E.O. Lawrence Award for their outstanding contributions in research and development supporting the Department of Energy and its missions. The six winners named today will receive a gold medal, a citation and $50,000. Winners will be honored at a ceremony in Washington, DC early next year.

    “The contributions made by these researchers to advance the national, economic and energy security of the United States are wide-ranging and meaningful,” Secretary Chu said. “I congratulate the winners and look forward to their discoveries still to come.”

    The Lawrence Award was established in 1959 to honor the memory of Dr. Ernest Orlando Lawrence who invented the cyclotron (a particle accelerator), and after whom two major Energy Department laboratories in Berkeley and Livermore, California are named.

    The 2009 E.O. Lawrence Award winners are:

    Sunney Xie, Harvard University – Chemistry


    Joan F. Brennecke, University of Notre Dame – Environmental Science and Technology

    Wim Leemans, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – High Energy and Nuclear Physics


    Zhi-Xun Shen, SLAC National Accelerator National Laboratory and Stanford University – Materials Research


    Omar Hurricane, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – National Security and Nonproliferation


    William Dorland, University of Maryland – Nuclear Technology


    This year's E.O. Lawrence awards went VERY QUIETLY under the LANS radar this year. Why? Because our great National Laboratory was not awarded one. Even LLNS got one. No excuses people! Take my word for it, this is serious blow to LANS it spite what anyone will say.

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  11. I nominate Bret Knapp. The man is a wonder. I heard he saved the W76 LEP from certain failure. He turned DARHT around and now he is working hard to save X-Div too with a brilliant reorganization. Our offices are cleaner and our future is brighter because of you. American thanks you, Bret.

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  12. The E.O. Lawrence Awards were interesting.

    Eighty five percent of DOE's budget goes to nuclear weapons.

    The awards went to 4 people from universities not DOE labs and one weapons person who might have done something (It's classified!) about secondaries in nuclear bombs.

    Hardly a stunning set of accomplishments from thousands of DOE scientists.

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  13. E.O. Lawrence Awards

    The award to Xie is ironic since it is for a field of research that was started at LANL and that DOE politics killed off.

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  14. LANL is slipping quickly in terms of its scientific excellence and integrity. The recent E.O Lawrence awards are just another example out of many.

    It's all about PBIs now and wearing shoes that GRIP! Keep up the deep denial, though, if it helps you get through the work day at this Bechtel operated "lab".

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  15. "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin"?

    The writing was "on the wall" over three years ago. It just took the employees time to decipher the meaning of the NNSA initials placed on the wall... "F.Y.A".

    Now, they know what these initials on the wall stand for and they don't mean: "For Your Amusement", do they?

    It's pretty clear than neither NNSA nor LANS executives think much of the employees who work under them.

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  16. E.O. Lawrence Awards

    The award to Xie is ironic since it is for a field of research that was started at LANL and that DOE politics killed off.

    12/19/09 5:51 AM

    That's not ironic that's LANS. Let's review that award. Sunney Xie was honored for his innovations in nonlinear Raman microscopy and highly sensitive vibrational imaging, his scientific leadership in establishing the field of single-molecule biophysical chemistry, and his seminal work in enzyme dynamics and live cell gene expression. Xie is in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University.

    Let the record show that LANS and DOE killed off this research off for whatever dumb reason and then ended up honoring someone outside of DOE for their scientific leadership for completing the work. Did I miss something here or are we that stupid?

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  17. "Did I miss something here or are we that stupid?"

    12/23/09 5:34 PM


    Demolition and disposal work doesn't require a Phd, does it? LANS is being "right-sized" and the work force is quickly being "restructured" to meet it's new requirements.

    Have you forgotten that LANL is now run by a sleazy construction company? Doesn't that tell you something?

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  18. 11:43 When the metric for success is, "didn't harm anyone" and "didn't release anything into the environment", what do you expect. Of course a better metric would measure the # and value of scientific advances per environmental release or person hurt. Since that metric is meaningful, it will never happen at a DOE lab and scientific achievement will play a distant second to the work free safety zone mentality and tearing down buildings.

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