Re: D&D for Plutonium Areas -Reply

[JMUCKERHEIDE@delphi.com]

Paul and group,

[re-sending since the system cut off the message again]

> Boy its getting warm. 
> 
> Rich and Don are exactly right. We're all HPs and we're all in the
> same boat. This listserve is about helping each other out. 

I had the impression that the requestor was not an HP, and that generated the
adverse response. 

 From the original question, I would sense that this is a guy in a contractor
organization who could spend 100 hours (including whatever "free" advise to be 
gleaned here), doing what a qualified government/lab employee could do in an
hour (with a result that still represents a poor perspective on the knowledge
an experienced HP -- which might be caught in review cycles that generate more 
hours).  This might be wrong, but the nature of the question, and the
forwarding from the SAFETY list would be consistent with that impression. 

I don't fault the requestor here. Like most of us, he's working for an
organization that got a mission or contract for whatever reasons and are
putting whatever resources they can on it, no matter how inefficient (but some 
contracting officer and contractor manager will "succeed" if the contract
comes in on schedule and budget (nobody ever asks whether the work could have
been done for <10% of the contract!?  :-) 

Perhaps underlying the frustration is the sense that this DOE Admin wants to
dump the knowledgeable nukes and HPs in favor of the "Chem E's" for site
cleanups. This results in less resistance to expending a $ Billion when the
polically incorrect old guard would say that the "contamination" is trivial
and warrants no substantive effort, or "it can be cleaned up for $10 million". 
 A naive ChemE can be told to find every Pu atom with no perception of the
context of radiation in the real world. He would asks fewer embarrassing
questions about why we're spending $100s billions for "cleanup" for
insignificant problems with no health benefits?! (HPS President Goldman
reported $ trillion for cleanup for negligible benefit in his editorial in the 
Feb 95 HPS Newsletter!) 

If anybody hasn't read that 1-pager, I strongly recommend it. It can be faxed
to anybody who can't put their hands on the Feb Newsletter. 

> Paul Frame
> framep@orau.GOV 
> 
Regards, Jim