National Ignition Facility Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory NIF lies to Congress about accomplishments to get $90M/Yr of your tax dollars every year Livermore California

 I worked at the National Ignition Facility, for nearly 6 years.  My job...I wrote the program that helped to build NIF.  When NIF was completed, my talents were deemed no longer necessary.  So now, I'm going to expose their biggest dirty little secret, the one that will totally invalidate any ground breaking claim that NIF claims to have made.

The people that were responsible for the Work Orders were on the Production Control team, and they were worked ragged.  So much so that at the point when I left they were entering in Work Order for work that had been done over 4 months prior and had since had been reworked 2-3 times over.

Now then...what does that have to do with lieing in their reports to Congress about their accomplishments?  Well, if they ever do claim to have achieve ignition...the world will want to know exactly what was installed when the shot that accomplished ignition was made.  That is sort of hard to do when Production Control is inputting Work Orders to replace parts from 2-3 months ago.  So how do they do it?

NIF has a computer program they wrote called "the Configurator".  Its sole purpose is to let the control room know that everything that should be installed is installed even though the parts that were installed for the experiment have not been logged into the records yet.  And that's where I came into play.

I wrote the utility that would allow the insertion of transactions that would appear as if they were done BEFORE the shot was actually made.  In other words, after an exciting, ground breaking, world wide news worthy experiment was done...they go in and change the details to suit the particulars of the experiment...AND THAT IS FRAUD!!!

In addition, the grandeur of waste occuring at the Lab is unprecidented.  For instance, Rick Olson, the senior programmer on the NIF project makes about $90/Hr for 8 hours a day, and then gets paid another $10/Hr for the other 16 hours of the day to be on call for support calls.  When a call does come in he get double time with a 2 hour minimum guarantee even if the problem only takes 5 minutes to fix.   In total, he probably makes ~$250,000/Yr...The thing is...he RARELY is ever at work more than 5-6 hours a day.  His work day begins about 9AM and he is usually gone by 2-3PM so he can go play golf with his son. 

Then there are the unnecessary meetings, the picnics, the ice-cream party's, etc... in which 5-600 workers get paid to not work.

And now you know how the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory spends your tax dollars it receives from the lies it spins to Congress.