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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." According to the report by the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration Office of Field Financial Management (OFFM), Livermore Lab's practice of assigning NIF overhead expenses to other Lab programs violates Public Law 100-679 Cost Accounting Standards (CAS). This law is an integral part of the structure set up to regulate government contracts. Some of the NIF fee reductions date back to 2001. The OFFM investigators noted that the misleading cost accounting, "materially misstates the actual costs by LLNL for the NIF/National Ignition Campaign... and may result in an undercapitalization of the NIF/NIC's total project costs."

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." According to the report by the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration Office of Field Financial Management (OFFM), Livermore Lab's practice of assigning NIF overhead expenses to other Lab programs violates Public Law 100-679 Cost Accounting Standards (CAS). This law is an integral part of the structure set up to regulate government contracts. Some of the NIF fee reductions date back to 2001. The OFFM investigators noted that the misleading cost accounting, "materially misstates the actual costs by LLNL for the NIF/National Ignition Campaign... and may result in an undercapitalization of the NIF/NIC's total project costs."

During a mock exercise at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), an antiterrorist "red team" breached security and penetrated Building 332, the so-called "Superblock" where some 2,000 pounds of plutonium and weapons-grade uranium are stored. Lab security personnel failed miserably, TIME magazine reported. Situated in Livermore, California, LLNL is about an hour's drive from San Francisco; approximately seven million people live within a 50 mile radius of the weapons facility. But as the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) disclosed in March,

Environmental monitoring of operations at LLNL in 2008 indicates no adverse impact to public health or the environment from Lab operations. The findings are presented in the Laboratory's Environmental Report 2008. The annual report demonstrates LLNL's continuing commitment to providing responsible stewardship of the environmental resources in its care. Environmental monitoring of operations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2008 indicates no adverse impact to public health or the environment from Laboratory operations. The findings are presented in the Laboratory's Environmental Report 2008. The annual report demonstrates LLNL's continuing commitment to providing responsible stewardship of the environmental resources in its care. The report also documents the integration of environmental stewardship into strategic planning and decision-making processes through the Lab's Environmental Management System.

Environmental monitoring of operations at LLNL in 2008 indicates no adverse impact to public health or the environment from Lab operations. The findings are presented in the Laboratory's Environmental Report 2008. The annual report demonstrates LLNL's continuing commitment to providing responsible stewardship of the environmental resources in its care. Environmental monitoring of operations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2008 indicates no adverse impact to public health or the environment from Laboratory operations. The findings are presented in the Laboratory's Environmental Report 2008. The annual report demonstrates LLNL's continuing commitment to providing responsible stewardship of the environmental resources in its care. The report also documents the integration of environmental stewardship into strategic planning and decision-making processes through the Lab's Environmental Management System.

Last Friday, Nuclear Weapons and Materials Monitor's Todd Jacobson reported that that National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) reduced by 30 percent Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC's award for the FY 2008 management of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) from a possible $53.7 million to $37.7 million. Part of the reason NNSA cut $16 million was LLNL's disastrous performance in an April security test by the DOE Office of Health, Safety and Security (HSS). In a fee recommendation memo, NNSA's Principal Deputy Administrator for Military Application Brig. Gen. Jonathan George found "the Contractor's performance in the area of protective force operations and information security to be 'unsatisfactory' based in large part on the Contractor's security failures surrounding the HSS audit."

Five years from now, Lab scientists will be able to better determine how, when and why plutonium moves in soil and groundwater. The way to predict how plutonium is transported in groundwater away from a site is by looking at the dominant geochemical processes that control plutonium's (Pu) behavior in the subsurface at environmental levels. But that isn't always so easy. A $6 million five-year proposal funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research (BER), will allow about a dozen LLNL scientists to study Pu transport at concentration levels at the picomolar to attomolar scale (equivalent to dissolving one grain of salt in 100 Olympic-size swimming pools).

"Weak management of the National Ignition Facility is being blamed for more cost overruns and delays to experiments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory project, according to a recently released report by congressional auditors. The cost of NIF's experimental program has already grown by 25%, or $400 million, to an estimated $2 billion through fiscal year 2012, and the scheduled completion of ignition experiments has been pushed back by a year, to September 2012, says the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The 192-laser NIF was officially completed more than a year ago, at a cost of $3.5 billion-$1.4 billion above the estimate when construction began in 1997. But GAO said that LLNL had been allowed to put off "major aspects of NIF's safety infrastructure," including installation of concrete doors and other target-area shielding to protect personnel from neutron radiation. Funding for those safety items, totaling around $50 million, has had to come from the National Ignition Campaign, and NIF's preliminary experimental program, which includes "nonignition" experiments producing temperatures and pressures below the ignition threshold, had to be suspended for several months while their installation was completed. That stoppage could delay attainment of NIF's experimental objective-ignition, the point at which the energy from fusion exceeds the energy needed to initiate the reaction-beyond the already postponed 2012 deadline."

Officials with the Lawrence Livermore Lab are looking into a potential hidden danger: hundreds of workers have been possibly exposed to a toxic metal dust. "It was hard," said Joyce Brooks, talking about the loss of her husband to beryllium poisoning. "I have anger," she said. Carl Brooks came straight from the Air Force to work at Livermore Labs in the 1950's. For the next 30 years, he machined parts out of the lightweight metal beryllium. "The dust was very toxic," she said. "And they did not have much protection except a paper mask." Eventually it destroyed his lungs. Carl Brooks died in 2000.

A team of outside experts audited beryllium work at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory last month and federal regulators are set to follow up with their own review in September. Some of the incidents involved workers being unknowingly exposed to beryllium dust, which if inhaled can lead to beryllium sensitivity and chronic beryllium disease, an incurable and potentially fatal lung condition. In one of the incidents, the lab failed for five months to notify 178 contract workers

It is a grim, almost unthinkable scenario: a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, smuggled into the United States, is detonated in a major U.S. city, perhaps even the Bay Area. Top federal officials and medical experts gathered in Washington on Thursday to consider this nightmare vision. Their conclusion: Cities and states are frightfully ill-prepared for dealing with an attack using a small nuclear bomb.

The feature article of a new journal, published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, contends that there are misconceptions about the links between radiation exposure and genetic (birth) defects. During the period between 1946 and 1958, a total of 67 nuclear tests were conducted on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls and adjacent regions within the Republic of the Marshall Islands. In recent years, there have been Marshallese children born to parents living in the northern atolls, diagnosed with Waardenburg's syndrome. "Based on current medical and scientific data, a connection between Waardenburg's syndrome and radiation exposure in the Marshall Islands is very unlikely," concludes the study.