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." 

Hi!  It’s time to bring you up to date.

We’ve returned from an amazing journey of 24,000 miles of talking to people about the need and right to vote on whether or not we should continue to possess, research, build, maintain, store, or otherwise support the continuing existence of nuclear weapons (which cost US citizens over $52 billion in 2009, and over $7 trillion since the 1940’s).

The trip’s over?  Not yet!

Road weary, after rolling through the theme park cities of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, (Dollywood was just up the road), we climbed through the sunset in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (the seventh and last park of the trip), and finally coasted down the homestretch through Cherokee, past Asheville, and into Tryon, North Carolina, with only one night to rest at Ellen’s mountain home before heading out again.

The next morning, after unpacking the van and detaching the trailer, Jay and Ellen were headed to Aiken, South Carolina — the closest town to the largest remaining pillar of the US Nuclear Weapons Complex — the Savannah River Site (SRS).  This is the government’s preferred location for all sorts of diabolical schemes, like MOX fuel transported from all over the country for “reprocessing.”  See http://nirs.org for lots of information on MOX and Savannah River.