Wednesday, December 13, 2006

LANL Blog Has Successor

ABQ Journal, Santa Fe Edition
Wednesday, December 13, 2006

LANL Blog Has Successor

By John Arnold
Journal Staff Writer

"The Blog" is back.
An anonymous "labbie" has resurrected a Web log that invites public
discussion about the inner workings of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The new blog, titled "LANL: The Corporate Story," is meant to be a
successor to "LANL: The Real Story," a popular Internet discussion forum
that criticized lab management and operations through mostly anonymous posts
from lab workers.
The original forum, known in Los Alamos simply as "The Blog," shut down
last summer.
Doug Roberts, the former LANL computer scientist who created and
maintained "LANL: The Real Story," is not involved in the new site, but he
said "a sometimes-contributor" to his blog had created a followup forum
about LANL and its new corporate manager, Los Alamos National Security.
The operator of the new blog— who identifies himself as a "labbie" and
uses the pseudonym "Pat, the Dog"— posted his first entry Tuesday.
"The bureaucratic constipation has not been relieved by 'privatization'
or 'corporatization,' as some prefer to call it," the moderator writes
before inviting comments on hot-button lab issues like layoffs, budget
restraints, pit production, safety and security.
Los Alamos National Security— a management team led by engineering giant
Bechtel National and the University of California— took over management of
the lab in June.
Soon afterward, Roberts shut his blog down.
Before that, UC had been the lab's only manager since LANL's inception
during World War II.
Roberts created his blog in the wake of the infamous 2004 lab shutdown,
when former LANL director Pete Nanos brought work to a halt following a
series of safety and security infractions.
The Web site hosted lively, sometimes-angry discussions about LANL
problems and became a magnet for LANL workers, journalists, scholars and
watchdogs searching for unfiltered information on the lab.
The new forum can be found at
http://lanl-the-corporate-story.blogspot.com.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

New LANL Blog

A sometimes-contributor to the old LANL, The Real Story blog sent me an email stating that, after much consideration, he had decided to start a follow-on blog about LANL and the new corporate presence there. So, without further fanfare, please feel free to visit "LANL: The Corporate Story" at http://lanl-the-corporate-story.blogspot.com/.

--Doug