[NukeNet] SF Chronicle: Group files longshot bid... wants Livermore to focus on peaceful purusuits

[marylia]

Good morning, colleagues, and some good news. From this Sunday's San
Francisco Chronicle -- a feature story on our partnership to submit a
"green" bid for Livermore Lab management. The heart of the article outlines
how we would transition Livermore to civilian science. It's a well-written
piece and a fun read, too.
Enjoy,
Marylia

Group files longshot bid for control of lab / Anti-nuclear activists,
partners want Lawrence Livermore to focus on peaceful pursuits

Sunday, October 8, 2006 (SF Chronicle)
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer

   It's a classic David versus Goliath standoff.

   A band of nuclear disarmament advocates, college educators and wind-energy
developers is positioning itself to go up against a consortium led by the
University of California and the politically powerful San Francisco-based
Bechtel Corp. for control of one of the nation's top nuclear design labs.

   The band, which includes longtime advocacy group Tri-Valley CAREs,
acknowledges it has little chance of outbidding the UC-Bechtel group for
management rights to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which has
been run by UC for more than half a century. But it plans to press ahead
anyway.

   The U.S. Department of Energy has given all comers until Oct. 27 to submit
their contract bids.

   "We do not believe the Department of Energy is going to choose our bid.
But that isn't how I define 'winning,' " said Marylia Kelley, one of the
Bay Area's best-known critics of the lab. She runs Tri-Valley CAREs
(Communities Against a Radioactive Environment), an activist group that in
its 23 years of existence has won widespread respect for its serious and
studied approach to its work.

   But, Kelley said, if her group's bid encourages public support for phasing
out the lab's nuclear weapons work and diverting its thousands of
scientists into research on global warming, alternative energy sources and
other subjects, that'll be a moral victory.

   Short of that, it'll be a moral victory if the campaign stirs enough
public interest to put pressure on Lawrence Livermore officials to run the
lab in a more environmentally conscious way and to be less secretive about
their work developing and refining the world's scariest weapons.

   On Sept. 21, Kelley and her colleagues announced they were bidding for the
contract, teaming up with New College of California, Nuclear Watch of New
Mexico and WindMiller Energy, a small wind-energy firm in rural New York
state.

   "It's important for us to try to push for citizen oversight of this
laboratory (so it can) use science for the benefit of the human
experience," said New College President Martin Hamilton.

   The Energy Department is expected to name the winning bid in March.

   So far, the UC-Bechtel consortium has been the only other competitor to
step forward. A UC spokesman could not be reached to comment on the rival
bid. Susan Houghton, chief spokeswoman for Lawrence Livermore, declined to
comment.

   The bid marks the first time UC has had to compete to run the lab it has
managed for more than half a century under exclusive contract with the
Energy Department. In 2003, Congress and the department, fed up with
security, safety, management and financial scandals, ordered that all
future contracts with national labs be open to competition. Last December,
UC-Bechtel beat out Lockheed Martin Corp. and the University of Texas for
control of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a lab that UC has
also managed for decades.

   UC and Bechtel officials say they'll refuse to release a public copy of
their bid for Lawrence Livermore on the grounds that the information might
be exploited by other competitors. In an attempt to shame UC-Bechtel, the
activists plan to post their entire bid for the contract online later this
month.

   "Lawrence Livermore is a publicly funded institution, funded off
taxpayers' dollars," said Tara Dorabji, outreach director for Tri-Valley
CAREs. "All bids should be public, and we'll make ours public."

   Dorabji said that if her group manages to win the contract through an
extraordinary set of circumstances, the lab would undergo a
transformation. The group, she said, would:

   -- Spend the majority of lab research funds -- largely provided by the
Energy Department and the Pentagon -- to develop cleaner, renewable energy
and to fight global warming. "Currently, the lion's share (of money) is
going to weapons development," Dorabji said, but the lab is already doing
"unclassified, fabulous research" on global warming that should be
expanded.

   -- Greatly speed up plans to move the lab's huge cache of plutonium to a
safer, remote site. Lab officials currently plan to remove the plutonium -
perhaps initially to a site in New Mexico, then perhaps to final storage
elsewhere - by 2014. By contrast, Dorabji's group would get rid of the
plutonium four years earlier, after holding public hearings to locate the
safest, most secure new site.

   -- Cancel the lab's current plans to expand its "biodefense" research
facility to study far more dangerous microbes. Accidental release of
killer bugs "could cause many, many, many deaths in the Bay Area as a
whole," Dorabji said.

   -- Ban secret experiments using the National Ignition Facility, the lab's
multibillion-dollar superlaser, which is used primarily to simulate
nuclear explosions to test the existing stockpile. Rather, the group would
encourage scientists to use the laser for peacetime research, such as
experimental simulations of natural phenomena deep inside the Earth and in
outer space.

   -- Mop up chemically and radioactively contaminated sites at the lab.

   "None of us want to close the lab," said Barbara Dyskant, vice president
of WindMiller Energy, a three-employee firm that she runs with her
engineer husband, Barry K. Miller. "They have wonderful scientists there
whose expertise could be very, very well rewarded by working on
non-weapons research."

   Hamilton said New College's participation in the bid for the Livermore
contract is consistent with the 1,000-student school's innovative
activities, among them its recent move to save the Roxie Cinema by
blending it with the campus' media studies program.

   The Livermore contract bid "is a challenge I could not pass up," Hamilton
said. "A lot of us use Don Quixote as a metaphor (for our work)." But
unlike the fictional Quixote, "we don't want to attack windmills -- we
want to use them to generate energy."

   E-mail Keay Davidson at kdavidson at sfchronicle.com.
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Paper version inlcudes photo of Tara and Martin.
Copyright 2006 SF Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/08/BAGS3LL5A21.DTL
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Marylia Kelley
Executive Director
Tri-Valley CAREs
(Communities Against a Radioactive Environment)
2582 Old First Street
Livermore, CA USA 94551

<http://www.trivalleycares.org> - is our web site address. Please visit us
there!

(925) 443-7148 - is our phone
(925) 443-0177 - is our fax

Marylia Kelley
Executive Director
Tri-Valley CAREs
(Communities Against a Radioactive Environment)
2582 Old First Street
Livermore, CA USA 94551

<http://www.trivalleycares.org> - is our web site address. Please visit us
there!

(925) 443-7148 - is our phone
(925) 443-0177 - is our fax