Nathaniel Solley/File

Two national laboratories in the Bay Area are set to furlough employees and halt research operations by Oct. 21 if the government shutdown remains unresolved.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — the second-largest employer in Alameda County behind UC Berkeley — is set to close along with Sandia National Laboratories, also located in Livermore. The furlough would affect roughly 6,500 and 1,000 employees at the two labs, respectively. Both labs conduct research and development in nuclear arms control and nonproliferation technologies.

In a statement released Friday, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin, said, “The 7,500 employees at risk of being furloughed … are among the best scientists and researchers in our country, and through no fault of their own they face the possibility of not receiving their paycheck at the end of the month.”

Swalwell, along with 10 other members of Congress from California including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, sent a letter Friday to U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz requesting back pay for furloughed laboratory employees after the shutdown is over.

Oct. 1 marked the beginning of the government shutdown due to an impasse over the federal budget.

Sandia spokesperson Michael Janes said the lab is in the process of developing contingency plans around the possibility of “a safe, secure and orderly shutdown of the labs.”

Previously appropriated funds from government contracts will allow Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, located in the Berkeley Hills, to remain open and operational, Berkeley lab spokesperson John Weiner said. The Berkeley lab employs an estimated 4,200 researchers and support staff.

Weiner said in an email that the lab is analyzing how and when programs and operations will have to adapt, adding that if the impasse over the federal budget is prolonged, impacts to research and employees would be “unavoidable.”

Peter Nugent, adjunct professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and senior scientist at the Berkeley lab, confirmed the lab will stay open as long as funds from existing contracts are available.

“For most divisions, this (goes) into November or December due to carryover,” Nugent said. “Then all bets are off.”

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, another national lab in the Bay Area that employs more than 1,500 researchers, will also remain open past Oct. 21.

At a town hall meeting held Sunday in Livermore, Swalwell addressed more than 200 employees from the two labs in Livermore.

“Not only will the labs’ cutting-edge scientific research be put on hold during a furlough period, our national labs could face an irreparable brain drain as our bright young scientists opt for the private sector,” Swalwell said in a press release.

Contact Jeff Landa at jlanda@dailycal.org.

The post Two Bay Area national laboratories to close if government shutdown continues appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The team — made up of Amitesh Maiti, Roger Aines and Josh Stolaroff of the Livermore lab, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering Berend Smit, postdoctoral researcher Jihan Kim and graduate student Li-Chiang Lin — published the research in the journal Nature Communications on April 16.

The researchers used computer modeling to simulate the effectiveness of liquid solvents and nanoporous zeolites — porous materials commonly used as commercial adsorbents — in capturing methane in larger concentrations so it can function as a fuel instead of a wasted byproduct, according to Maiti.

“We are fairly confident in our work,” Maiti said. “And the most advanced computational techniques were used in the work, so we believe that our prediction will be fairly close to the real performance of the material once it is made and put to test.”

The research is groundbreaking because methane contributes 30 percent of global climate warming, second only to carbon dioxide in emissions, according to a Livermore lab press release.

Methane has potential as a cleaner fuel source than coal, but it must be collected in larger concentrations before it can be used, Maiti said. In lower concentrations, methane is only a wasted byproduct of industrial and natural processes.

“We emit methane at a large distribution of sites, from cattle farms to dairy,” said Daniel Kammen, a professor of public policy and nuclear engineering in the Energy and Resources Group. “So you need a low-cost technology that you can apply to a lot of sites, and this technology might be something we can deploy very widely.”

Although researchers have yet to create the material, Kammen imagined ways of implementing methane-capturing technology.

“I think what you would do is take materials that have this embedded in it, and you would place it in places where methane is being emitted, like at a chicken coop,” Kammen said.

UC Berkeley professor of biometeorology Dennis Baldocchi suggested another important application of methane capture at lagoons and wetlands, where methane is abundant.

“The manure (from the dairy industry) is going into these lagoons, and these lagoons tend not to have very much oxygen,” Baldocchi said. “These conditions are very ripe for producing large amounts of methane, and this methane is going into the atmosphere. So what we can do is harvest these lagoons for methane and use it to generate electricity.”

According to Kammen, the likely low cost of the technology could make it easier to implement in industry.

“We do need policies that make this attractive (to industries),” Kammen said. “Otherwise, this will be a great innovation that won’t go anywhere.”

Contact Yvonne Ng at yng@dailycal.org.

The post Researchers discover materials to transform methane into fuel appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The city’s Peace and Justice Commission drafted the letter, addressed to the UC Regents and other entities that cooperate in management and research at the laboratories. The letter cites the 1986 Nuclear Free Berkeley Act, a portion of the Berkeley Municipal Code that prevents the city from contracting with or investing in groups that engage in nuclear weapons work, and asks that the university no longer manage those labs in light of the “nuclear danger to the world.”

Councilmembers Gordon Wozniak and Laurie Capitelli voiced criticism of the letter at Tuesday’s council meeting.

“It was rather ironic that we were asking the university for a favor, and the attitude was, while I’ve got you on the phone, please stop managing the labs, because we have a nuclear-free ordinance,” Capitelli said.

In September and November, the City Council granted two waivers exempting UC Berkeley from the NFBA. The waivers greenlighted funding for the startup incubator Skydeck and enabled the city to store a sizable cache of emergency medical supplies with UC Berkeley.

The NFBA requires that council grant waivers whenever the city enters an agreement with UC Berkeley due to the university’s continuing relationship with Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Peace and Justice Commission administers the NFBA and recommends grants or denials of waivers.

“We asked the City Council from here on out, when a waiver is granted that bears on the university, a letter be sent to the university stating our opposition to their continued management of the labs,” said Peace and Justice Commission Vice Chair George Lippman.

Both Wozniak and Capitelli support focusing efforts on encouraging the federal government to reduce or eliminate weapons stockpiles.

Wozniak previously attempted to have the NFBA’s restrictions on investments and contracts removed. He suggested splitting the city’s boycott of the labs from the university.

“If they want to keep this clause, it should only apply to the national labs, and there should be a blanket exemption to the campuses that don’t do any weapons work,” Wozniak said.

Jasmina Vujic, UC Berkeley professor of nuclear engineering and director of the Berkeley Nuclear Research Center, described the university’s role in the national labs, however, as a moderating influence on the private companies that help manage the labs.

Capitelli also called adjusting the NFBA an issue to be visited sometime in the future. Changing the code would require a ballot measure brought either by the City Council or by a citizens’ initiative.

Nonetheless, the item passed unanimously in the council, despite concerns brought up from various council members that the letter be properly focused.

Gautham Thomas covers city government. Contact him at gthomas@dailycal.org.

The post Berkeley City Council asks university to halt management of Livermore and Los Alamos labs appeared first on The Daily Californian.

When UC Berkeley researcher and physics professor Richard Muller published the results of a climate change study in a New York Times Op-Ed piece on July 28 before submitting them to journal review, he incited a controversy in the science community.

The results — which were published by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project which Muller and his daughter, Elizabeth, founded — show that the Earth’s temperature has risen 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 250 years, with 1.5 of those degrees rising in the most recent 50 years. The study matched this increase with the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.

Together, according to Muller, these two sets of data point conclusively to human release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as the reason for climate change.

Muller also stated in his article that Berkeley Earth’s findings were “stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” which is the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming, and added that he expects the temperature to continue to rise.

“Because we were able to get the temperature all the way back to (the year) 1753, we could look for the fingerprints of the various causes,” Muller said.  “We could look at volcanoes, ocean currents, solar variation and greenhouse gasses, and the match to the greenhouse gasses was so close that I had to conclude that they were essentially responsible for all of the global warming.”

What has caught the attention of the greater climate change science community is not Muller’s findings, which are consistent with research that has been accumulating for nearly half a century, but that Muller chose to release the results of the study in The New York Times, rather than through the traditional process of submitting the information to a science journal for peer review.

Benjamin Santer, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was one of the first to speak out against Muller’s article and told the Los Angeles Times that he “found it troubling that Muller claimed such definitive results without his work undergoing peer review.” Santer is out of the state and could not be reached for comment, but Santer’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison Director Karl Taylor agreed with this view.

“The research in this area has been going on for a long time, and scientists have looked at it very carefully and came to very careful conclusions before,” Taylor said. “It’s a little troubling that supposedly some evidence has come to light that hasn’t yet been peer reviewed.”

Elizabeth Muller, co-founder and executive director of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, responded to these claims and said the information published in the New York Times article was worthy of immediate publication.

“The journal system takes a long time, and we felt that these findings were too important to keep from the public for another year,” she said. “We’re all talking about policy changes about global warming, and we were somewhat skeptical, so we felt that our simplicity of our new model made it much more convincing.”

Richard Muller’s research is also a marked departure from his previous opinions on climate change, as he was formerly among the skeptics who doubted its existence. The Charles Koch Foundation, responsible for funding a portion of the project, has likewise been linked to groups that have contested climate change in the past.

“They only accounted for one-sixth of our funding, and they wanted us to do good science,” Muller said. “They never gave us any indication of what they wanted us to find because they understand that science doesn’t work that way.”

The findings were released online in an effort to practice “traditional peer review,” according to Richard Muller, who asserts that all information was distributed to scientists both publicly and privately.

“We are the most transparent group,” he said. “The peer review system is (that) you present public talks, publish your work, and you solicit criticism. We’ve gone through all of those, and we’re getting much better information from other people who’ve read the paper than through the preprint approach.”

The post Berkeley scientist publishes research without peer review, sparks controversy appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The retirees claim that their monthly premiums and co-payments on health insurance rose in September 2008 after Lawrence Livermore National Security – a government consortium of private companies and the UC – took over management of the lab from the U.S. Department of Energy.

According to the appeal, plaintiffs Joe Requa, Wendell Moen, Jay Davis and Donna Ventura all worked for decades at Livermore Lab, retiring between 1999 and 2006, before the consortium began operating the lab in 2007. The UC continued to provide them with the same pensions and health care provided to other UC retirees under the UC Retirement Plan until Jan. 1, 2008, the appeal states. At that time, the UC removed the retirees from the pool of active and retired UC employees and the consortium switched their health care provider to an outside source, according to the appeal.

The plaintiffs’ largest concern was that their benefits would become increasingly expensive as they had been separated from the larger population of UC retirees and placed in a pool composed of older and generally less healthy people, according to the appeal.

The Alameda County Superior Court ruled that the UC Board of Regents’ demurrer — essentially a request to throw out a case — would be sustained with leave to amend in December 2010 and ruled in favor of the regents in May 2011. Judge Frank Roesch reasoned that the documents presented by the the retirees’ attorneys contained “conditional language” and did not guarantee the retirees lifetime participation in UC employees’ medical plan.

“We expect that the appellate court will affirm the Superior Court’s ruling that the University’s transfer of responsibility for retiree medical benefits to the new contractor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was legal and appropriate,” said Charles Robinson, UC vice president and general counsel for legal affairs, in a statement last May.

The retirees filed a writ of mandate – the first step in the appeals process that can take several months, according to Carl Whitaker, a publicist hired by the retirees – in late summer, resulting in $75,000 in legal fees on top of a $150,000 payment already spent on the case.

For their appeal, Whitaker said in an email that retirees are relying on precedent set by a case in November 2011, in which the justices of the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of Orange County retirees in a similar situation. The high-profile November decision found that state agencies can be bound by an implied contract –  meaning that the regents may be obligated to maintain the post-employment benefits promised to the appellants upon their hire.

“(Judge Roesch) was saying you need to show clear, unambiguous language,”  said Bill Payne, a partner in one of the law firms representing the plaintiffs. “But the California Supreme Court said that circumstances can imply lifetime benefits. That case, which came out after ours, increases our chances to prevail.”

The post Livermore Lab retirees submit appeal in lawsuit against UC appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The organization, Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, challenged the U.S. Department of Energy, which funds the lab, on its methods of dealing with potential terrorist or accidental situations if lethal pathogens such as anthrax were released from the lab facility. The case was presented before a panel of judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who promised an expedient decision due to the case’s importance.

The lab, which is one of three department labs that the University of California is involved with managing, researches science and technology to solve national security issues.

A panel of three circuit judges listened to and inquired about the oral arguments of both attorneys representing the organization and the department. The community organization has been litigating to stop operations of the Biosafety Level-3 bio-warfare agent research facility — a facility within the lab — since 2003.

The organization contended that the lab did not conduct a deep analysis of how to respond to the consequences of a bio-hazardous chemical being stolen and released from an employee or a terrorist because the lab decided that the probability of those events occurring is too low.

“To analyze something or to not give significance to the situation occurring, you need to first determine what those impacts are,” said Scott Yundt, staff attorney for the organization.

Judge Milan Smith Jr. responded that even the lab’s assessment that the probability of an attack was too low for further investigation is technically an analysis in and of itself.

“The government did a whole lot of analysis — it just did not do what you are asking it to do,” Smith said.

Smith suggested that the organization could continue to litigate because the community group will will never be satisfied with the lab review’s outcome.

In the department’s defense, Barclay Samford, the defense attorney, said the facility works with extremely small amounts of any given hazardous chemical at one time, the employees work with nonweaponized forms of the chemicals and there are only around ten employees who have access to these materials.

Samford agreed with Smith’s conclusion that the lab has conducted an analysis regardless of how the organization approves of the final outcome of that analysis.

On the other hand, Yundt said that according to the National Environmental Policy Act, the lab has provided an insufficient analysis for a potential catastrophic pandemic even if the probability of occurrence is low.

The post Organization brings case to federal court against Livermore Lab appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Though one in every 10 jobs in the East Bay has been lost since 2007, the profession, scientific and technical service industries of the area are projected to grow by an annual rate of 3 percent over the next eight years, according to the study produced by the East Bay Economic Development Alliance.

The economic turmoil felt in the East Bay and Alameda County — unemployment rates for the county were 10.7 percent in August — is not unique to the region; the unemployment rate in Los Angeles County was at 12.5 percent in August and the state’s rate was at 12.1 percent, according to the California Employment Development Department.

However, while economic hardship is the norm across the state, the high number of research and development institutions in the East Bay is certainly not — the area is more than three and a half times more concentrated in scientific research and development than other regions, according to the study.

The positive effect this has had on the local economy — which the study says is driven by innovation — is unmistakable, Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, chair of the East Bay EDA, said in a press release about the study.

“It is clear that professional, scientific, and technical activities — including life science and clean energy firms play a vital role in our regional economy,” Carson said in the press release. “They are the drivers of economic growth in the East Bay and, as the report shows, critically linked to the East Bay’s strength in advanced manufacturing as well.”

The study recommends the building up of the local economy’s assets, listing among them the number of “world class” research and development institutions located in the area: UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia national laboratories.

In addition to directly employing over 30,000 workers, these research and development institutions have had a role in supporting many of the region’s professional, scientific, technical and information service and advanced manufacturing businesses, according to the study.

“The (Lawrence) Berkeley Lab absolutely helps the local economy,” said Paul Preuss, science writer and spokesperson for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “We employ a lot of people and also have a lot of contractors in the area we use to do specific jobs here — so not only are we a big employer, we also use the services and products that are offered locally.”

The study concludes that with the shoring up of these institutions and further development of the various technical and scientific sectors in the region, the East Bay economy will be able to thrive and grow.

“With these assets identified, now comes the task of taking action to keep them strong and to allow employers and job seekers alike to benefit from them and from all the East Bay has to offer,” said Karen Engel, executive director of the East Bay EDA, in the press release. “Although the recession has taken a heavy toll on East Bay jobs and recovery is currently limited, the report shows why the region is poised to return to prosperity in the long term — across a variety of industry sectors.”

The post Study shows promising signs for innovation-driven East Bay economy appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The UC Livermore Retiree Group — which claims that the UC allowed premiums and co-payments on employee health insurance to be raised in September 2008 after the lab’s management changed — filed an appeal July 29 in the Alameda County Superior Court, challenging the court’s May 26 decision in favor of the UC Board of Regents.

“The reason we’re doing this is that we don’t think the judge made the right decision,” said Joe Requa, president of the group and a petitioner in the case. “The (court) ignored everything the university ever told us.”

The original decision was made after the UC requested that the court throw out the case in December 2010 due to a lack of credible evidence.

As a result, the retirees were forced to file an appeal and rework their case to keep it open — which resulted in around $75,000 in legal fees.

In order to afford the appeal, the group is slowly raising money to pay the court in $25,000 increments, in addition to a $150,000 payment already spent on the case, according to Requa.

The initial dispute arose due to a transfer in management of the lab to Lawrence Livermore National Security — a government consortium of private companies that includes the UC — which took over the lab in 2007 from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The consortium has previously maintained that medical care was still offered during the entirety of the lawsuit and has not ceased as a result of the original transfer.

Representatives from the UC could not be reached for comment.

Although medical care has remained, Wendell Moen, a plaintiff in the case who worked at the lab full-time from 1963 to 2000, said the retirees want their original benefits and need the university to be more transparent when it comes to their health care.

“My belief is still that the university must re-examine its ethical positions with employees like me,” Moen said. “There is no reason in the world that they ought to single me out and move me into another group — it was purely a financial decision and is not one that ought to affect me.”

Dov Grunschlag, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said the appeals process will last approximately 12 to 18 months.

According to Grunschlag, the retiree group sees the appeal as a second chance to correct the errors of the trial court’s ruling.

“We are hopeful that court of appeal will see that the claims we have made are legally valid,” he said. “On a practical and moral level, (the retirees) put their trust in the university, not in some organization that they have now — there is no telling what that outfit might decide to do with retiree benefits, if they might decide to eliminate them altogether or reduce the cost of them.”

Requa said that he is hopeful that the group’s appeal will be successful in overturning the judge’s original decision. However, he added that because of state budget cuts, the process may take some time.

“Given the fact that the California courts have been given a money cut, it’s not clear how fast things happen,” he said. “All we can do is sit and wait and see what the courts will do.”

The post Group of UC retirees appeal court decision appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The new National Science and Security Consortium will continue technical research being done in nuclear technology and will work toward training young people, giving financial support to undergraduates, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students working on nuclear security.

Edward Watkins, director of the Office of Proliferation Detection at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said the five-year program would be a way to integrate students into the lab system “to the degree that we can motivate students into nuclear nonproliferation applications.”

“We’ve got the chance to go through an entire cycle of students and see it from the beginning to the end of a student’s life cycle,” he said.

In addition to involving students, the consortium will take a unique approach to tackling nuclear security issues.
Chancellor Robert Birgeneau explained in a speech at a reception for the consortium that the consortium will aim to bring together technical research and public policy issues, drawing upon experts from a vast spectrum of backgrounds.

This approach acknowledges that the problems surrounding nuclear security are not merely scientific in nature and that an appreciation of the political issues behind nuclear weapons proliferation is important as well.

The establishment of the consortium marks nuclear security as a priority, both on an educational and a governmental level.
Anne Harrington, deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, recognized the importance of nuclear security in a statement.

“First, we need to create new technologies to detect nuclear proliferation or testing, and to monitor compliance with nuclear nonproliferation and arms control agreements,” she said in the statement. “Second … we need to invest in the next generation of nuclear nonproliferation expertise and provide links between the talented students in our universities and the nonproliferation challenges that our national laboratories will confront in the future.”

Nuclear security is not, however, limited to proliferation and nuclear weapons. The recent disaster in Fukushima, Japan, has revealed the risks that come with using nuclear power and the need for experts [that] who can ensure that existing reactors continue to operate safely.

“There’s obviously a lot of interest in seismic safety,” said Parney Albright, principal associate director of global security for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Nuclear safety has always been a concern for not just the general public but also for regulators and practitioners in industry. Really having a good technical understanding of the various failure modes in nuclear power (is needed).”

Albright said future nuclear power plant production needs to be expanded in order to combat greenhouse gas emissions.

“That means that we’re going to be expanding nuclear reactor capacity in this country, and that means in turn that we need to pay a lot of attention to the safety concerns of the public and the safety concerns that surround nuclear power in general,” he said. “We’re talking about new types of nuclear power reactors that will be cheap and will reduce the capital costs associated with nuclear power.”

The post UC Berkeley to take lead of nuclear consortium appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The UC Livermore Retiree Group — whose health benefits were altered in September 2008 after the lab’s management was taken over by Lawrence Livermore National Security LLC — sued the board over claims that the UC allowed premiums and co-payments to be raised in 2008. The retiree group will have 60 days from the filing of the final court judgment to enter an appeal.

Joe Requa, president of the group and a petitioner in the case, worked for the lab for roughly 40 years and said he believes health benefits were compromised after the UC transferred ownership in 2007 from the U.S. Department of Energy to the Lawrence Livermore National Security, a government consortium of private companies that now includes the UC.

“All we want is the same benefits that other UC retirees are getting — in court, we believe we are being mistreated because we are being singled out from the other retirees,” Requa said. “Secondly, if the UC does in fact owe us something, it seems odd that they make changes to our medical policy.”

The retiree group has already spent over $150,000 for the lawsuit and will have to raise an additional $75,000 to afford to file an appeal to the Alameda County Superior Court, which sustained the regents’ demurrer — a legal attack that is essentially a request to throw out a case — allowing the UC to win the case and disallowing the group to reopen it without the appeal.

“My view is that the law is not what is reflected in this trial court’s order,” said Dov Grunschlag, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “The petition that we filed sufficiently states the claim for continued health benefits for UC retirees that worked at this lab for a period of retirement under whatever medical insurance plans that the UC provides to all its retirees.”

Though the retiree group is still unsure of whether to take action, Charles Robinson, the UC’s vice president and general counsel for legal affairs, said the board is satisfied with the lawsuit’s outcome.

Similarly, Lawrence Livermore National Security maintains that medical care was still offered during the entirety of the lawsuit and has not stopped as a result of the original transfer.

“As part of the requirement by the contract transferred from the Department of Energy, the (Lawrence Livermore National Security) was required to sponsor all medical benefits and had to be similar to the benefits offered by UC — these benefits never discontinued during the lawsuit,” said Lynda Seaver, a spokesperson for Lawrence Livermore National Security.

However, most retirees said they are still frustrated with the university’s bureaucracy and still believe the university has not been able to provide proper health care benefits.

“We trusted the integrity of the university, and we were there because we felt it was a worthwhile mission,” said Wendell Moen, a lab retiree and a plaintiff in the case. “As an older person, in the long run, risks will be higher and costs will be higher, and frankly, I don’t think they did treat us right.”

Going forward, retirees said they will look to their group’s members to decide if raising additional fees is feasible in order to file an appeal. Should they find that they are able to raise enough money, they will make a decision in the coming month regarding further litigation.

“I think the one thing that is important from a policy and fairness perspective is that if their coverage can be terminated by UC, then no UC retiree is safe from this kind of treatment, and everyone is at risk of having insurance terminated or drastically modified,” Grunschlag said

The post Livermore Lab retirees may appeal benefits lawsuit decision appeared first on The Daily Californian.