Bay Citizen/NYTimes: The new, privatized Livermore Lab sags in its journal-worthy output
The Bay Citizen is a non-profit and mostly on line news agency in the SF Bay Area, where its reporter John Upton recently turned out an eye-opening review of labor problems at, and a lawsuit against, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is on the other side of the East Bay hills as one takes the highway from Oakland toward the Central Valley. Once known widely almost exclusively for designing and testing a large part of the US nuclear arsenal (Los Alamos does the rest), its recent public attention has been mostly on the gigantic National Ignition Facility that the Dept. of Energy built to mimic thermonuclear explosions without having to light any of them off (plus, perhaps, open a door to commercial fusion energy).
I missed this piece when it came out, about a week ago. It ran in the Bay Area edition of the NYTimes, which uses the Bay Citizen’s material extensively but only regionally. It is worth wider circulation, especially by those who follow national securitys and the DOE’s overlaps with scientific research. What stands out, to me, is not the labor problems so much - a result of layoffs and of an apparent failure to get hoped-for savings from letting private industry to most of the management (with hefty fees to do it). Nope, it’s that the once enormous flow of peer reviewed journal articles that the thousands of engineers and physicists and chemists and others once churned out is now a merely large flow. In 2005, it says here, the count was about 1400 articles. Last year: 800. That’s a cliff. The article reads, to the extent I still follow lab news, to be a fair summary of its problems of mission and budget. It raises the issue: are DOE’s and other national labs all suffering similar constriction in scientific publication output? Is it all due to the smaller staff at Livermore? Is privatization part of the problem?
Disclosure: My first real newspaper job, after I got out of the army, was at the Livermore Herald & News. It was a part of the old Floyd Sparks newspaper empire-ito that was based in Hayward, and that has now long-since been absorbed into the much larger MediaNews Group that newspaper mogul Dean Singleton founded. MediaNews by the way has my second newspaper employer, the SF Chronicle, surrounded now except on the west but only because there are no newspapers in the sea. The Livermore lab was on my beat at both papers. Beyond that, while I never met physicist and cyclotron-inventor Ernest Orlando Lawrence, who died when I was in junior high, I did 43 years ago marry a daughter of his (just celebrated our anniversary). Thus, via my late and feisty mother-in-law came thorough immersion in Livermore Lab history – including her profound, dying regret that the Livermore facility’s Cold War profile overshadowed as EOL’s legacy at the “real” Lawrence lab, the one in Berkeley that does no classified work. She wanted the Livermore stepchild renamed for somebody more in keeping with its hydrogen bomb identity: Edward Teller. I told her I’d do all I could to minimize recurring media confusion over which Lawrence lab does what. So listen up: there are two of them. Don’t mix them up.
- Charlie Petit
