"Virtually every major project under the National Nuclear Security Administration’s oversight is behind schedule and over budget.... years of lax accountability and nearly automatic annual budget increases has racked up $16 billion in cost overruns on 10 major projects that are a combined 38 years behind schedule.... the nuclear program — run largely by private contractors and overseen by the security administration, an arm of the US Energy Department — has turned into a massive jobs program with duplicative functions.... a gigantic self-licking ice cream cone for contractors’’
Someone is taking a licking, American taxpayers.
"US nuclear agency faulted for laxity and overspending; Cost overruns on delayed projects add up to $16b" by JERI CLAUSING and MATTHEW DALY | Associated Press, September 14, 2013
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — At Los Alamos National Laboratory, a seven-year, $213 million upgrade to the security system that protects the lab’s most sensitive nuclear bomb-making facilities doesn’t work. Those same facilities, which sit atop a fault line, remain susceptible to collapse and dangerous radiation releases, despite millions more spent on improvement plans.
Our own Fukushima just waiting to happen, huh?
In Tennessee, the price tag for a new uranium processing facility has grown nearly sevenfold in eight years to upward of $6 billion because of problems that include a redesign to raise the roof. And the estimated cost of an ongoing effort to refurbish 400 of the country’s B61 bombs has grown from $1.5 billion to $10 billion.
We can process uranium but Iran and North Korea can not?
I'd say it is all nonsense, but....
Virtually every major project under the National Nuclear Security Administration’s oversight is behind schedule and over budget — the result, watchdogs and government auditors say, of years of lax accountability and nearly automatic annual budget increases for the agency responsible for maintaining the nation’s nuclear stockpile.
The nuclear security administration has racked up $16 billion in cost overruns on 10 major projects that are a combined 38 years behind schedule, the US Government Accountability Office reports.
Other projects have been cancelled or suspended, despite hundreds of millions of dollars already spent, because they grew too bloated.
The $ecurity $tate $tole America's future.
Related:
"$32 billion for equipment that was never built"
How is that for an "investment?
Advocates say spending increases are necessary to keep the nation’s nuclear arsenal operating and safe, and to continue cutting-edge research at the nation’s nuclear labs.
Yes, you must continue to pour money down a contractor's rat hole.
But critics say the nuclear program — run largely by private contractors and overseen by the security administration, an arm of the US Energy Department — has turned into a massive jobs program with duplicative functions.
‘‘The post-Cold War nuclear warhead complex has become a gigantic self-licking ice cream cone for contractors,’’ said Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, a watchdog organization.
US Senator Claire McCaskill, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security financial and contracting oversight subcommittee, said a key problem is the Energy Department’s reliance on private contractors to carry out its mission. The Energy Department has fewer than 16,000 employees and more than 92,000 contractors.
‘‘Unfortunately for the taxpayer . . . cost overruns, schedule delays, and technical failures are the rule, not the exception,’’ said McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat. ‘‘We need to find a better way to do this because we can’t just afford the status quo anymore.’’
Why was it allowed to get $o far in the fir$t place?
Related: Navy Yard Shooting Proves Failure of NSA
And we didn't even get our money's worth!
The retired head of one of those contractors, former Lockheed Martin chief executive Norman Augustine, told Congress last spring that the absence of day-to-day accountability and an ineffectual structure at the nuclear security administration pose a national security risk.
He described a ‘‘pervasive culture of tolerating the intolerable and accepting the unacceptable.’’
Energy Department and the nuclear security administration officials agree that there are problems. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said earlier this month that addressing the cost overruns, and also embarrassing security breaches at some facilities, is a top priority. A congressionally appointed panel, cochaired by Augustine, recently began studying a potential overhaul of the nuclear security administration.
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A nuclear security administration spokesman referred the Associated Press to congressional testimony by the agency’s project and acquisitions manager, Bob Raines, who said projects completed in the last two years had met cost goals and finished under budget.
‘‘We are making progress,’’ Raines testified in March before a House subcommittee.
I wouldn't believe this government on that one anymore.
If they are always "making progress" WHY are things always GETTING WORSE?!?!
Remember all the progress they claimed they made during these never-ending wars?
We have had DECADES of PROGRESS!
Why is the country in $UCH $HITTY $HAPE, huh?
These issues at the nuclear security administration aren’t new.
At least progress is being made.
The agency, along with the Defense Department and programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, is cited regularly in a Government Accountability Office report of agencies considered ‘‘high-risk’’ due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, and mismanagement or because they are most in need of broad reform.
And what doe$ that tell you about the greate$t government ever?
However, the nuclear labs are getting renewed scrutiny in light of forced across-the-board federal budget cuts and security lapses such as an incident last year in Tennessee.
And then the Navy Yard shooter struck!
Before finally being detected, an elderly nun and two other protesters cut through security fences, hung banners and crime-scene tape, and hammered off a small chunk of a building inside the complex that is the nation’s central repository for bomb-grade uranium.
Related: Time For This Post About Tennessee
And time to end this one.
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Another asleep at the switch situation:
"Killings at Navy Yard began with shooter’s co-workers" by Ashley Halsey III, Clarence Williams and Sari Horwitz | Washington Post, September 21, 2013
WASHINGTON — Authorities are investigating whether a workplace issue sparked the killings, according to law enforcement officials and witness accounts.
Now the cover story is going to be a workplace issue?
People in the department where Aaron Alexis was working had concerns about his job performance, and investigators are looking into whether those concerns escalated last week, the officials said.
‘‘He was not doing a very good job, and somebody told him that there was a problem,’’ one law enforcement official said. ‘‘Our belief is that the people who were shot first were people he had issues with where he worked, people he had some sort of a dispute with. After that, it became random. . . . After the first shootings in that office, he moved around and shot people he came upon. They were then targets of opportunity.’’
This is a pile of bull s***, folks.
Alexis, a former Navy reservist who had recent problems with mental illness, was employed by a company contracted to upgrade computers at the Navy Yard.
Which went unreported on his record -- the same as the prescription pharmaceutical connection missing from this piece.
Workers and law enforcement officials said Alexis worked on the fourth floor, where the shootings began. Although the investigators say they do not know the exact order in which the victims were shot, they said the rampage started in an area of people who would have worked with him.
The officials cautioned that they are still trying to learn more about the severity of the dispute and whether it was an impetus for the shootings.
The law enforcement officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is in its early stages.
Translation: more government bull s*** to come.
********************
FBI Director James Comey said Alexis arrived for work at about 8 a.m. Monday and parked on a deck across a narrow road from Building 197. Carrying a bag containing a Remington 870 shotgun, he entered the building and went to a bathroom on the fourth floor.
Both the stock and the barrel of the shotgun had been sawed to shorter lengths, making the weapon more compact and easier to wield, Comey said
‘‘He shot folks on the fourth floor and the third floor,’’ Comey said. Then he walked downstairs to the lobby ‘‘and shot a security guard and took a weapon from the security guard — a Beretta semiautomatic pistol — and continued moving up and down through the building, focusing on the third and fourth floors.’’
Is there anyone out there who actually believes anything the FBI says anymore?
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Strange behavior for an alleged Buddhist, huh?
This behavior not so strange coming from "leftist" cultural managers and politically-correct commissars that populate AmeriKan ejerkashun:
"Kansas professor takes heat over D.C. shooting comment" by Roxana Hegeman | Associated Press, September 21, 2013
WICHITA, Kan. — A University of Kansas journalism professor was placed on indefinite administrative leave Friday for a tweet he wrote about the Navy Yard shootings which said, ‘‘blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters.’’
I almost feel that way about some things -- almost.
David W. Guth, an associate professor of journalism, made the comment on Twitter after Monday’s shootings in Washington, D.C., in which 13 people died, including the gunman.
The tweet didn’t get much attention until CampusReform.org posted a story Thursday, sparking a social media backlash and prompting some state lawmakers to call for his dismissal.
What more is there to say? If some "righty" had made an objectionable comment it would have been headline news! It took COLLEGE KID CITIZENS to DRAW the ATTENTION!
But hey, what is another failure of AmeriKan journalism in a long list of them?
Maybe the professor here could help you out.
The university also responded, as Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little issued a statement Friday saying that ‘‘in order to prevent disruptions to the learning environment,’’ Guth was placed on indefinite administrative leave pending a review.
His classes will be taught by other faculty members.
Guth, who on Thursday told the Associated Press in a phone interview that his tweet “got a conversation going — that was exactly what I wanted to do,” agreed Friday that the university’s action was appropriate in light of e-mail threats he and others at the university had received.
Oh, now he is the poor, persecuted victim. He must be employing that infamous AmeriKan journalistic spin that he knows so well.
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While I agree he should not be dismissed on free speech grounds, this case shows you how dominated by "leftist" thinking is the educational intelligensia in this country.
UPDATED: Confirmed Attempted Arrest of President Obama Linked to Navy Ship Yard
UPDATED: Confirmed Attempted Arrest of President Obama Linked to Navy Ship Yard
