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Work resumes at lab, but questions remain
 by Diana Heil, October 25, 2004

Although most everyone is back to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the effect of the shutdown, which began in July, has left some heads swimming with questions.

Are the lab's best scientists being lured away?
Have projects been shipped off to other labs?
When will everything be back to normal?

This summer, LANL director Pete Nanos shut down all classified work at the nuclear-weapons lab because two classified disks couldn't be found -- what he considered a notch in an unwelcome pattern of security lapses. A day later, he shut down normal operations entirely after learning about a laser accident that injured a student intern's eye.

And since then, the date for restarting the entire lab keeps slipping. Here's the latest: By Nov. 1, the lab hopes all high-risk activities will resume, according to lab spokeswoman Kathy DeLucas. However, DeLucas said one section could take until December: The Dynamic Experimentation Division, the origin of the missing disks.

Already, though, employees are allowed to handle classified material with some restrictions, DeLucas said.

As of Friday, 83 percent of moderate-level and 21 percent of high-risk level activities are back on board. All along, employees have been showing up at the office but their time has been spent in training and procedures related to safety and security.

The lab has not lost any projects to other Department of Energy laboratories, according to LANL spokesman Kevin Roark. And as far as the lab knows, universities, private industry and other laboratories are not luring away more employees than usual.

"I think it's no secret that morale has gone down sharply at the laboratory because of the shutdown and issues associated with that," Nanos said in an interview Thursday.

Such a situation, he said, creates a fertile ground for recruiters. Recently, Nanos sent out e-mails asking managers throughout the lab to give him a sense of the scale of recruiting. But Thursday he said he won't put a number on the loss because the subject needs more analysis.

Nanos said to prevent losing talent, the lab is striving to strengthen the science environment.

Typically, turnover at the lab is 3 percent, less than academia and industry, according to LANL public affairs.

During this time, Nanos fired four employees and disciplined eight others over the accident and missing disks. The lab forced one senior manager to retire in lieu of termination, and keeps another employee on paid leave while the FBI investigates the missing disks.

Firings aren't prevalent. This year, in addition to the recent firings, the lab dismissed five employees for cause and one employee for poor performance, according to Roark.

Source: The New Mexican

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