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All right, so if you have any other questions, especially late at night, if you would just please call Greg. | |
| He'll be our team scribe. | ||
| But thank you guys for listening. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
| We'll be around if you have any other questions. | ||
| I will tell you, we are leaning on partners and friends and developer relationships here, obviously, as we look to work in that market in a new and different way. | ||
| There are several companies that we're teaming with, facilitating them entering a new market while we as a company work to enter a new market. | ||
| So very much appreciate the collaboration. | ||
| thank you and enjoy the rest of the conference please and we'll get started with our next panel Before we do, and while you're making your way to your seats, I have a special shout-out here from our team. | ||
| One of our key managers from Savannah River, Kelly Kennedy, was just promoted to vice president today. | ||
| So, Kelly, congratulations. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| All right, and I'm honored once again to be able to chair a panel of the three lab directors who probably have, if not the most difficult job, one of the most difficult jobs in DOE and in NSA. | ||
| And we're going to talk today about some of the challenges they face. | ||
| And this is, we've done this a few times before, but this is the last time that James is going to be here with us as he's announced his retirement. | ||
| We've tried for a year to talk him out of it, unsuccessfully so. | ||
| So, James, thank you for all you've done for Sandia and for the country. | ||
| Let's have a round of applause for James. | ||
| With that, we're going to make this a real panel and dispense with the podium. | ||
| So, what we'd like to do today is just talk about the same things that Teresa talked about earlier today, the key elements of success for NNSA in general, the National Security Enterprise, and of course, the labs. | ||
| And these three lab directors and their institutions have made great progress in the last year in a number of areas. | ||
| And what we're going to do today is talk about that and then talk about what comes next. | ||
| And just let me, by teeing that up, if you think about what they did, and again, you've heard this in the briefings this morning, met all the key mission milestones for the life extension programs and the RD programs, streamlining the way we do business. | ||
| And all of them have had both this bottoms-up and top-down approach where they challenge their teams to give them innovative ideas. | ||
| And then they heard both from all the new employees we have and all the existing employees those ideas and made them actionable and always using a risk-based approach to make sure we were applying the right requirements to each mission and project. | ||
| Third is streamlined decision-making. | ||
| You know, we all know we need that, and they've done a tremendous job in that. | ||
| And of course, it's the basic of just moving the decisions down to the lowest possible level to let things get done faster. | ||
| At the same time, maintaining the proper level of oversight and governance, which we all know is critical using digital tools and other things, but just having good metrics and good contractor assurance programs. | ||
| And then, of course, for all of the above, using digital tools to analyze this mountain of data that we generate to detect trends and inform the work that we do in real time so that we avoid the problems, not just find them and fix them, but avoid them before they can impact our mission and projects. | ||
| So, what we're going to do is talk about the same four that Teresa and DJ teed up today. | ||
| First, we're going to talk about innovation. | ||
| Then, we're going to talk about infrastructure. | ||
| Thirdly, we're going to talk about operations. | ||
| And then, finally, what makes it all work is developing the workforce of the future, our people strategy. | ||
| So, let me start with innovation. | ||
| I mentioned before implementing digital tools and digital transformation as areas where you've made great progress. | ||
| Can you describe what you've achieved? | ||
| And I know in the past year, you've used it to improve our design methods, improve our operations, and our production capability, and of course, in maintaining a strong science piece. | ||
| And then finally, if you could wrap into that, what do you need to take that next step? | ||
| What do you need from NNSA to be able to take the next step in that innovation? | ||
| So, Kim, do you want to start? | ||
| You picked the wrong chair. | ||
| Thank you, John. | ||
| That was a big question. | ||
| And thank you for bringing us back together again. | ||
| We've spent a lot of this year talking about the digital transformation that we're trying to drive forward. | ||
| And I think it's going to impact our work in a number of ways. | ||
| But I'll start with the simplest part, which is simplest. | ||
| Conceptually simplest part, which is the backbone, to connect the labs, plants and sites in a more seamless manner and ensure we have common electronic infrastructure that we can share information seamlessly between sites to really streamline how we go from design through engineering to production and make those cycles efficient and modern and provide what we're hoping will be a digital thread for the work that we do, so that we'll have, you know, | ||
| really good data and great tools to enable us to do stockpile modernization in new ways. | ||
| Within the laboratories, we're also using our new tools and capabilities. | ||
| You heard earlier that we just cited several new computers. | ||
| Tom will talk about what they're doing at Los Alamos, but we just cited El Capitan at Livermore. | ||
| So this is the NNSA's first exascale computer for national security. | ||
| We're number one, which is pretty exciting. | ||
| But the computing is now at a scale where we can do things that seemed inconceivable 10 years ago. | ||
| I mean, 3D modeling has become a routine tool of design. | ||
| We're linking together our engineering and physics design capabilities. | ||
| And this machine also has 44,000 GPUs in it. | ||
| So it's an amazing tool for things like AI. | ||
| So we're really starting to bring that ethos into our science and design communities to speed the pace of learning and really be able to think very differently about how we do all elements of our work on the stockpile. | ||
| So I think I'll stop there and pass over to colleagues. | ||
| I'll just pick up right where Kim left off, actually. | ||
| You know, if you look at what went into making El Capitan possible, and by the way, all three labs are going to be able to use that resource, so we're kind of basking in the reflected glory. | ||
| I think there are of order a dozen key technologies that went into enabling that tremendous computational resource that were developed as part of the Exascale Computing Project that are actually baked into all the big investments that are being made by the hyperscalers to train their models. | ||
| So it doesn't get a lot of attention, but that exascale program actually was the building blocks of what is a transformational technological revolution that's underway right now. | ||
| And so when you read about OpenAI announcing Stargate and XAI putting 100,000 GPUs working to a million GPUs in Memphis, under the hood, is technology that came out of our decades of pursuit of ever faster computers. | ||
| And one of the nice byproducts of that is machines like El Capitan or the Venato supercomputer that we deployed at Los Alamos in the spring not only are wonderful for doing the multi-physics simulation that are critical to our ability to assure the effectiveness and the safety and reliability of our nuclear stockpile, they're also going to be great for artificial intelligence because they have this kind of hybrid architecture. | ||
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And I think one of the things that we're really excited about is the possibility of adding that to our toolkit, not to replace the traditional modeling and simulations that we have, but to accelerate it. | |
| In fact, it'll be an important training database for AI and also to take advantage of the tremendous resource we have in terms of experimental data. | ||
| And that's something where the three labs are really working very closely together. | ||
| You know, we're hopeful that we can make an announcement of that before too long. | ||
| But it is something that's going to enable us to go faster. | ||
| And that's important because we are going to be asked to go faster. | ||
| We are being asked to go faster. | ||
| You know, the Strategic Posture Commission captured that with the necessary but not sufficient. | ||
| And we are very, very busy right now with things like infrastructure, topic to come up. | ||
| And the only way we're going to have the capacity to go faster is to use some of the tools that actually we've been working so hard to enable over the last few decades. | ||
| Well, Kim and Tom covered a lot of the mods and pieces of the digital transformation, but there's some other areas here that are where I'll give you the positive pieces and then the challenges. | ||
| So in the W93 program, it'll be born digital. | ||
| All the integrated product teams have bought into basically using digital thread as their way of doing design through manufacturing. | ||
| And in some cases, the 87-1 has the IPTs doing digital thread. | ||
| But this isn't without its challenges because there's eight labs, plants, and sites that have to come together and agree on a common set of tools. | ||
| And I would just tell you, culturally, that's a challenge just at Sandia by itself. | ||
| And the mechanical tools or the electrical design tools and coming with the ones that we are going to provide, only a certain version of it for our engineers. | ||
| And then things as simply as staying up to date, which is something as simple as our word processing tools, that they're all at the same version level. | ||
| There's a lot of challenges in this. | ||
| And I believe tomorrow, Laura McGill and Jamie Wolf will be on a panel talking about this so you can ask them more detailed questions. | ||
| But the bottom line is we're making progress in these areas, but there are a lot of challenges. | ||
| Can I ask you then to address under innovation a term that I think Jim McConnell uses and may have been coined by the past administrator, technology insertion, because you've got such strong, tremendous technology base in all of the labs, and you develop these technologies, and I know one thing that I've heard you all speak about is how long it takes us for a lot of good reasons and some not so good reasons to deploy them. | ||
| What innovations, what progress have you made in the last year in technology insertion? | ||
| Because you say, when you can deploy those technologies sooner, it can work them into the mission to go faster and better and more efficiently. | ||
| So, Kim, do you want to start again with technology insertion? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, I think this is an area where we have actually made a lot of progress. | ||
| And as James mentioned, with the digital transformation, changing the kinds of technologies we use and the way we use technology is equal parts technical and cultural. | ||
| It's not as simple as saying, I have a great new idea or a great new tool or a great new technology, let's just roll with it. | ||
| There's a high degree of confidence we have to build in a new technology or a new manufacturing approach. | ||
| And there are many legacy processes and procedures built around the way we do things today. | ||
| So that cultural piece can't be ignored. | ||
| And I think we have really built a strong partnership across the labs, plants, and sites that's allowing us to gain speed in inserting new technologies. | ||
| So for us, we put a big emphasis on new manufacturing technologies. | ||
| And what's interesting to me is that you usually think about designing technology and then building things. | ||
| So manufacturing is a tool to enable you to do things. | ||
| The capabilities we have now with advanced manufacturing tools like additive manufacturing mean it changes the way you think about design because you can make things that are very different from what you can conceive about with old tools. | ||
| So we're sort of seeing the whole process become much more iterative as we learn the capabilities and the power of these new tools and things like on-machine part inspection and control and design optimization tools that allow us to really iterate through many, many variations of a new part. | ||
| So in our modernization programs that we're pursuing now, so we're the design agent for 80-4 life extension program and 87-1 mod. | ||
| We're inserting new technologies because we have this capability now to change the way we've thought about these designs to make these warheads more manufacturable, more sustainable, easier to maintain through the life of that system. | ||
| Yeah, I think we've gone through, I'm a condensed matter physicist, so I'll say we've gone through a phase transition. | ||
| You know, there was a long period of time where really built into the way we were thinking about things was change as little as possible. | ||
| We have designs that have their origins in the era of testing, and anything that we do to introduce a change in how we manufacture can introduce some sort of uncertainty that might cause us to question that basis. | ||
| And I think we're over that now. | ||
| We're over it for a couple of reasons. | ||
| First off, because of things like the modeling and simulation tools that we were talking about before, we have a much better ability to understand the consequences of a change in material or a change in the manufacturing approach and actually convince ourselves that it's okay. | ||
| I think the other thing is that, and James Owen mentioned this in a session this morning, it's not just a question of can we design things that are easy to manufacture, it's what do the new manufacturing technologies enable in terms of design possibilities that simply could not be accomplished any other way. | ||
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And the fact that actually with a lot of the additive manufacturing and digital design, complexity is much less frightening than it used to be. | |
| You can actually make things that are very, very complex in a relatively straightforward way. | ||
| And that actually gives the designers some flexibility in terms of how they approach solving a problem that they did not have in the past. | ||
| And we're no longer bound by that. | ||
| And I think we now have enough confidence in our ability to understand those changes that we can take advantage of it and also take advantage of the fact that it may require a smaller footprint. | ||
| It may produce less waste material in the form of spoils. | ||
| And the materials we deal with, you'd rather not deal with large quantities of unused material. | ||
| And all of these are things or benefits that can help us stay within a kind of bounded cost envelope. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| I'm pretty excited right now because last week we had a successful 80-4 flight test with the Air Force. | ||
| And there's new technology in there. | ||
| Unfortunately, you can't go into specifics, but between Lawrence Livermore's technology that they've inserted and Sandia's, this really is an amazing advancement in how we think about these systems. | ||
| And there's a lot of stuff coming through through the kind of the laboratory scale that's coming through that's going to really change the way, at least at San Diego, we think about our safety themes for nuclear weapon systems. | ||
| So I'm really excited about that coming through. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So the next topic, we're going to move on to number two, and that's infrastructure. | ||
| And Kim, you can relax because I'm going to start with James this time. | ||
| Okay, we're going to start on the other end. | ||
| So in infrastructure, we know that some of our infrastructure was built 75 or 80 years ago and needs to be upgraded. | ||
| And the enterprise blueprint that you all talked about and you all contributed to is a great description of the must-have infrastructure. | ||
| And I like the way the past administrator said it's not a wish list. | ||
| This is absolutely essential to the mission to support over the next 25 years. | ||
| So with that, what are the key things you need at your lab to effectively carry out the enterprise blueprint, including help in implementing those creative approaches that I know you're all working on on supply chain, using commercial standards and broadening the supply base? | ||
| So James, you want to start with that? | ||
| Well, I'm going to say I'm very excited about Enterprise Blueprint and having negotiated with NNSA and other labs, plants, and sites the list of facilities that need to be recapitalized. | ||
| But I want to go in a little different direction to your question, John, because we've got to sustain a lot of facilities before the new ones come around. | ||
| And so that's going to be a really significant issue from a funding standpoint. | ||
| We have to continue to have facilities that make the electronics for the weapons. | ||
| We have to continue to have facilities that qualify parts for the weapons. | ||
| And if you look at the enterprise blueprint, some of those facilities, it's going to be five to ten years from now before we get new facilities. | ||
| And we put these facilities in a run-to-failure mode literally a decade ago. | ||
| That was a good decision at the time because it was, at that time, it looked like we would be recapitalizing these facilities today, but it's going to take longer. | ||
| And so we've got to sustain these facilities to continue to execute on the modernization programs. | ||
| And then there's other things that aren't in the enterprise blueprint that we also need, pay attention to, and that's just lab space and office space. | ||
| A lot of that needs to be recapitalized through the complex. | ||
| So there's a lot to be done here. | ||
| Overall, very excited about the enterprise blueprint because it lays out kind of a timeline for the facilities that we absolutely have to have. | ||
| But some of these facilities we absolutely have to have before they're recapitalized. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the important thing in my mind about the enterprise blueprint is it does look across the spectrum of types of infrastructure that are needed to support what we do. | ||
| It's easy to spend all of your time focusing on the really big ticket nuclear facilities because they do take a tremendous amount of dollars to get built. | ||
| They take a long time to get built. | ||
| They have very significant requirements in terms of safety and security that drives all that cost. | ||
| So you see a lot of focus on discussions on things like UPF, the plutonium infrastructure investments at Los Alamos and Savannah River. | ||
| But the Enterprise Roostprint also talks about some of the infrastructure that we use to design, certify, and assess the stockpile. | ||
| Those are scientific tools, they're test capabilities that are absolutely important. | ||
| Actually, paradoxically, even though sometimes we take the shorthand to refer to these as our science facilities, if you want to know what's the shortest path between infrastructure and impact on the on-alert deterrent, it's actually through those facilities because it's in resolving questions that may arise in the surveillance programs or whatever. | ||
| And to be honest, the pits that we're building at Los Alamos, as important as they are, they're not going to affect the on-alert deterrent until Sentinel is in the field. | ||
| So there are a lot of pretty urgent things in that scientific piece of the infrastructure that are every bit as important as the big facilities. | ||
| As James pointed out, one of the concerns is bridging. | ||
| So at Los Alamos, for example, we got approval of Critical Decision Zero, the mission need for a much needed modernization of the front end of our Lance accelerator, which is one of those tools that we use to resolve issues, be important for qualifying new high-explosives, for example. | ||
| But we've got to keep the facility running, too. | ||
| And in fact, this year we're curtailing operations because we don't have enough spare parts. | ||
| So while the lamp upgrade is tremendously important in ensuring the future of that facility, the more mundane things that are, you know, we call it maintenance and operations, it doesn't look quite as flashy as El Capitan, but it's extremely important for the ongoing health of our deterrent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I agree wholeheartedly with James and Tom. | ||
| One of the best parts of the enterprise blueprint effort was the time we spent as a community coming to consensus on what's in that report. | ||
| And so what you read there is a shared commitment to the success of all the sites. | ||
| And I think that is really an important place for us to be because the need is so large. | ||
| At my site, we have sort of three different categories of needs for infrastructure. | ||
| First and foremost is this recapitalization of some of our scientific infrastructure. | ||
| So we have the National Ignition Facility, our large laser facility, which is a very high-tech place, but it's been operating full tilt for almost 15 years now. | ||
| And so there's a need for an investment in just sustainment of the facility. | ||
| And we just recently received Critical Decision Zero mission need to do an energy upgrade to the laser where we'll be able to increase the laser energy output from 2.2 megajoules to 2.6 megajoules and maybe higher, allowing us to push that facility and our ignition experiments into the more high yield regimes, which are critically important for our support to the stockpile. | ||
| And we use that facility routinely to do things like material testing and exposures and to really study in depth the science of nuclear weapons. | ||
| So it really is an important day-to-day contributor to our support for the stockpile. | ||
| In the second category, I would put enabling infrastructure. | ||
| So we have a lot of needs on our site. | ||
| As an example, one of our most recent line items was a power and cooling upgrade to our computing facility so that we could site El Capitan. | ||
| So that kind of infrastructure, again, is not glamorous, but it's critically important to operating these big facilities and operating our sites in an efficient and sustainable way. | ||
| And then for us, for those of you who haven't visited Livermore, it's a small site, physically small. | ||
| We're one square mile. | ||
| And we have 9,000 employees, which that workforce has grown by more than 50% in the last 10 years. | ||
| We need office space, and we can't GPP our way out of this problem. | ||
| The average GPP scale building is just too small for a site where the footprint is so small. | ||
| So we've been working in close partnership with NNSA to get Critical Decision Zero for an investment in office space infrastructure so that we can build up a little bit and much more efficiently use our site and bring our weapons program teams closer together so that we can foster collaboration for the important work that we have to do going forward. | ||
| So it's been an interesting journey. | ||
| We've been working closely on our infrastructure plans with our partners at the production sites, also trying to build out production development capabilities that allow us to really study the science of production and help bring new capabilities for production of polymers, for production of explosives, and other key components to aid this process of modernizing in the production facilities. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| You know, we talked earlier today, and DJ did, and it's a great thing to celebrate 75 and 80 years at our facilities. | ||
| But the real celebrations we all want to have, and you're going to hear this in the plants and sites tomorrow, is where you and of course Roger and Eric and Rich and Kelly, when you guys commission those new facilities that you're building right now, that's going to be something to celebrate. | ||
| So DJ, put that down for your list of champagne toasts for the future, if you would, please. | ||
| Let's go to operations then. | ||
| As we expand operations to support the upgrades to our national security capabilities, what are your top issues that you need to address? | ||
| Because obviously, you know, we've been doing the research, we just talked about operation, or just talked about infrastructure, but as we move more into operations for pits and LEPs, what are the challenges you face? | ||
| How are you using digital tools to ensure the strong safety and security performance and the performance of those new facilities? | ||
| And then just overall, what keeps you up at night when you look at operations moving into that phase, which is exciting and it's absolutely essential. | ||
| But what are the things that keep you up at night to say these are really the things we've got to address first and foremost to make that successful? | ||
| Tom, do you want to start with that one? | ||
| Well, certainly our biggest challenge now that we've, you know, in fact, at the event where we were celebrating receiving the Diamond Stamp, the first production unit, W87-1 PIT, it was pointed out that this is not a finish line. | ||
| It's actually the starting line. | ||
| And we've got a lot of work ahead of us over the next couple years to build out the capability to get up to the 30 pits per year that Teresa mentioned in her remarks. | ||
| But we have to do that in an operating facility. | ||
| And that is a challenge because we want to continue producing pits, maintain the competency to produce the pits, train people to be proficient in doing that. | ||
| At the same time, we're ripping out obsolete hardware and bringing in new glove boxes, and that's in a nuclear facility that has been operating for decades and doesn't necessarily have the best as-built drawings. | ||
| And occasionally, when you open a valve, you find that there's something sitting inside there that's been around for a while. | ||
| And that's the quickest way to knock us off our pace in terms of the infrastructure build is actually an operational upset that would bring work to a halt because if it's not safe, we're not doing any work until we can remedy that situation. | ||
| So I think for us, the biggest operational challenge is actually the interleaving of the operations with the infrastructure work. | ||
| We don't have the luxury of a kind of greenfield location. | ||
| And there are other important missions in the PF4 facility in addition to pits, and they are ongoing as well. | ||
| There's important surveillance work that we have to do. | ||
| There's the heat sources for the TU-238 and the Aries mission, as well as R ⁇ D. | ||
| So it's a kind of unique challenge, and it's one that keeps me and actually a large number of other people up at night. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| James, you want to go next? | ||
| Yeah, I think the things that keep me up at night are the maintenance of these facilities. | ||
| So I'll give you a couple examples. | ||
| At the Anglo Corps reactor, which is a critical facility for qualifying parts that go to nuclear weapons, we lost a safety rod. | ||
| It started to leak. | ||
| Fortunately, we saw it. | ||
| It wasn't going to be any issue with the safety of the reactor, but we had to replace that rod. | ||
| And there was only one spare. | ||
| So we're down to no safety rods. | ||
| Now we're going to build up some new ones with the support of NSA. | ||
| But that kept the reactor down for a year. | ||
| And that's kind of the things that happen when you're dealing with a nuclear facility. | ||
| When you find these things, it's typically at least a year. | ||
| And then with our MESA facility, a tool that's really critical to making these very special transistors for nuclear weapons systems also went down for three months. | ||
| Fortunately, we'd built up enough, I guess, capacity and reserves to effectively continue to feed Kansas City so we didn't lose anything on the life extension programs. | ||
| But if it happened at a different time, we would have. | ||
| So those are the kind of things that are both operational and producing product, but also have safety implications. | ||
| So we have been embarked on a multi-year effort to rethink how we do work, really to try to find a way to be much more efficient and move much more quickly to meet the demand signal that was mentioned earlier. | ||
| And so we've tried to go back to basics in this process. | ||
| You know, there's a few prime directives we have to follow. | ||
| You have to be safe, you have to be secure, we have to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollar, we have to be highly transparent to the government. | ||
| And so we've been working with our teams to try to find ways to meet those objectives and then remove barriers that don't materially add, don't necessarily make us materially more safe or secure, don't really help us execute these programs or manage the risks that are attendant with the kind of work we do, but really get us focused on delivering on our mission commitments. | ||
| And so this has been a great experience. | ||
| We have a lot of new workforce. | ||
| They have lots of ideas. | ||
| It's been a way to engage them and to really rethink how we do our operations in our facilities. | ||
| I think that's really important. | ||
| A companion piece to that has been modernizing all our business systems. | ||
| We had a lot of home-built business systems. | ||
| Many where the requirements were written by physicists, spoiler alert, they were all terrible. | ||
| Not because the people who built them weren't competent and capable people, but because we have this sort of Byzantine set of requirements for them that was highly optimized to 20 years ago. | ||
| So we've been working to bring in more commercial products and really have modern infrastructure to enable business and operations at the laboratory. | ||
| And then the last piece, we've been working with our colleagues at NNSA to really streamline our contract to understand where authorities can be delegated, where requirements in the contract can be streamlined so that we can again focus on delivering at pace on our mission. | ||
| And that's been a really productive effort. | ||
| We've made a lot of great changes to our contract to simplify it and streamline it, make it more understandable and accessible. | ||
| And I look forward to continuing that work with our colleagues at NNSA. | ||
| All right, thank you. | ||
| And it is clear, isn't it? | ||
| I know you've worked hard on this, but getting as close alignment, and I think we're as close to alignment with our NNSA client, both on objectives and implementation. | ||
| I know it always takes longer than we'd like to take those steps, but as far as delegation, and we're all working on the same problem. | ||
| And I think that's a tribute again to all of our NNSA counterparts out there, both in headquarters and the field. | ||
| So let's go to the last one then, and we will have a wrap-up at the end of all this, but people strategy. | ||
| As I said earlier, it's the attracting and retaining the workforce of the future that makes this all work. | ||
| So the market's changed over the past few years post-COVID, but I know it's still challenging in a lot of ways, different ways than it was four or five years ago with a lot of competition, particularly from other high-tech industries. | ||
| So what are your main initiatives to assure that we're developing the workforce of the future, both engineers, scientists, and of course a sufficient numbers, the high-quality craft workers? | ||
| And then what help do you need from NNSA? | ||
| They were very, very helpful in helping us balance out benefit and pay and things like that in the past. | ||
| What do you need as the next step in that to make sure that National Security Enterprise is the employer of choice for people? | ||
| Kim, do you want to start with that one? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, the most important thing that we have to offer our employees is the incredible mission that we support. | ||
| And so the number one thing that attracts people into our environment is the opportunity to do this incredible science and technology work in support of really critical national missions. | ||
| And so the national commitment to the work that we do, the clear guidance on the nuclear deterrent, the pace of work that's attendant really makes it an attractive environment to work on. | ||
| The work we've done with NNSA to really improve our salary and benefits package has been very helpful. | ||
| So our lab sits very proximate to the Silicon Valley and to a lot of very high-tech employers. | ||
| So there's always naturally a flow in and out of the laboratory due to that. | ||
| Cost of living is very high in our area. | ||
| But we've been able to make substantial Progress, so it changes the calculus for employees. | ||
| They want to stay and support the mission. | ||
| So, we're not going to pay the way Google pays, that's fine, because we offer other things, but we have to offer a fair compensation package to make things work. | ||
| And then the last piece is really focusing on the employee experience. | ||
| As I said, all these new employees really need to learn about us, about what we do and why it's important, about the kinds of missions we support and the kinds of opportunities they have to build a career in our environment. | ||
| So, we put a huge effort on really teaching people about the mission and being much more purposeful in how we talk about our work and engage with all of these new employees so that from early in their career they really feel a part of the work that we do and they really understand this bigger picture of what we're trying to accomplish in the nuclear security enterprise. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Tom? | ||
| Our focus has been shifting away from the rapid growth that we experienced and the addition of new staff to more retention and development of the staff that we have. | ||
| Our peak hiring year was 2023. | ||
| We hired about 2,500 new staff. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| But the numbers have been coming down. | ||
| This year, depending on what happens with the budget, it'll be more like 1,200. | ||
| And our normal turnover is about 800 to 900. | ||
| So we're not quite at steady state, but we're pretty, we're getting there. | ||
| The hiring is tapering. | ||
| So we brought in a lot of new people, net growth of about 5,000 over the last five years or so. | ||
| They're enthusiastic, they're smart, they have skills that are going to be very valuable to our mission. | ||
| And what we don't want to have happen is just as they're getting to a point of proficiency, which actually takes a couple of years at least in our business, that they go off somewhere else. | ||
| And as was mentioned, I think we've made progress in terms of our compensation and benefits, and that was really critical a couple of years ago, in particular, when there was a lot of turnover across the economy. | ||
| People were experiencing inflation and hopping jobs to try and counteract that. | ||
| So we're not in a bad spot there. | ||
| I think where we need to be focusing, though, is maybe not so much the kind of monetary and benefit side of the equation, but more the job satisfaction. | ||
| Now, as Kim said, our mission is a big source of job satisfaction. | ||
| People want to do something that matters. | ||
| So we've got that one. | ||
| I think where we still have work to do is some of our, although we talked a little bit about infrastructure and a lot of the infrastructure investments are focused on kind of what you might call the hard infrastructure, the scientific facilities and the nuclear facilities, production and so forth. | ||
| We have a lot of people at Los Alamos who are actually working in pretty crappy conditions and doubled and tripled in offices and buildings where the rodents send me rude emails because it's so decrepit. | ||
| And, you know, obviously you've got to have the production infrastructure, you've got to have the scientific infrastructure, but we also need to give people decent spaces in which to do their jobs that are sort of a 21st century work environment. | ||
| I think the other thing where we can do better is some of the things that Kim talked about in terms of streamlining how we do our work can have a huge influence on how satisfied people are. | ||
| No one wants to spend hours a day doing things that they feel like are not adding any value to this mission that's so important. | ||
| And it's a tremendous source of frustration for staff when they see their time getting burned away doing things that aren't meaningfully advancing the mission. | ||
| And although I think we've made a lot of progress on that front, I think there's a whole lot more that we could do. | ||
| You know, the ways we do things largely built up during a timeframe when there was not the kind of geopolitical urgency driving delivery that we have right now. | ||
| And it was okay for things to have long timelines because it was a slowly evolving geopolitical environment. | ||
| So we need to go faster to respond to the moment. | ||
| But I believe that in figuring out ways to go faster, removing low-value edit work will have a huge positive impact on our ability to retain employees. | ||
| They join our institutions to get a job done, and if they feel like they can get that job done, it's going to be hard to pry them loose. | ||
| But if they feel like they're running into dead ends and they're always getting, you know, no, send me another rock, then they won't stick around. | ||
| And then we'll have to start that recruiting and training and proficiency process all over again. | ||
| And it takes time and it costs money. | ||
| Well, this is actually a really good news story. | ||
| I think three years ago I told you about double-digit attrition at the laboratory is basically three years in and you were out. | ||
| We had more than 50%, I think 60% of our workforce was less than five years. | ||
| Instead, that kind of model just does not work for a national lab because about the time they're getting proficient in their skills, they're leaving. | ||
| And so we worked with NNSA. | ||
| We made a big bet at Sandia and our employees. | ||
| We worked with NNSA to get our salaries aligned with what the market would provide. | ||
| Worked on benefits. | ||
| I'll talk about one here in just a minute. | ||
| Also back to the environment they work in. | ||
| We started what was called the Unleashed Excellence Initiative, which is trying to move some of these death by a thousand cuts that were happening and how difficult it was to get things done at the laboratory. | ||
| And I'm happy to say now that our attrition numbers are actually less than they were pre-COVID. | ||
| And in hot fields like which you would never believe that people with AI experience would be willing to even work for market conditions, what we can negotiate with NSA, our attrition number there is actually less than 1%. | ||
| And because it's because of the mission, they get to work on machine learning and AI to actually help with nuclear deterrence. | ||
| We got things like we're creating bots that are design experts. | ||
| They're working on making everything from procurement to training more efficient for engineers and scientists. | ||
| And the one thing that kind of blew us away that NNSA allowed us to negotiate our benefits was two floating holidays. | ||
| And I thought, well, that's great. | ||
| I always like to have a couple extra days off. | ||
| But it turned out that was a huge deal to our employees because they got to take those days off. | ||
| Maybe it was their birthday. | ||
| Maybe, because we don't, at Sandia, a lot of the holidays we group together to give people off during the Christmas break. | ||
| And things like Martin Luther King Day and just various things like that they got to take off was the most popular thing we did with regard to benefits in a long time. | ||
| So the numbers are looking really good. | ||
| The mission is as exciting as ever. | ||
| A lot of new tools coming into play in how we do our work. | ||
| So it's an exciting place and we're not having trouble keeping people, at least at this point in time. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Good response. | ||
| And Tom, you raised a good point. | ||
| You know, we're all faced with up to half of our workforce has been here less than five years. | ||
| And that idea of bringing someone in that says this procedure doesn't add to safety and security and quality. | ||
| Why am I doing it? | ||
| It doesn't even apply to my project. | ||
| And I think that idea that you all have endorsed the past several years of getting it down to risk-based: what are the risks of this either operation or this RD, and then what requirements apply so that people buy in? | ||
| Because not only will they not follow the requirement, but they'll find someplace else to work where they don't have to do these nonsensical things when they come to work. | ||
| But I'd say, you know, you've all seen, and I think we have through FCOG with the folks at headquarters that we've had the dialogue with Todd LaPointe and John DuPuy and some of the other folks to talk about that. | ||
| How do we apply them? | ||
| How do we apply the right parts of the DOE orders or commercial standards wherever we can, like OSHA Plus? | ||
| So I think that's a journey that we've gone on. | ||
| And I think if the progress that you've made in that, and congratulations, I think is something that probably we're just scratching the surface of getting down to where we've got the right standards for each mission and project. | ||
| I think it's important to remember: we've done a lot of work with NNSA to streamline requirements coming from DOE and NNSA, but we've also been very introspective and looked inside our own institutions. | ||
| I would say eight times out of ten, when someone tells you, oh, we have to do this because there's a DOE order, ask them what order it is, because there isn't one. | ||
| We have the same problem inside our institutions where people are earnestly trying to reduce a little bit of risk or manage something in the right way. | ||
| And so we are, you know, taking this message very seriously and trying to clean our own house as well. | ||
| The other thing I've seen that you've done, and you know, this is not unique to national security, but it's also true in commercial nuclear. | ||
| Somebody comes to work every day and they've got 110 things that are important, you know, or 110 orders they've got to meet or requirements. | ||
| And working with them to understand what the top four or five of the high-risk items that they absolutely must take care of first and foremost is something you've done a good job. | ||
| And again, kudos on doing that. | ||
| I think as we streamline that, that's going to energize people. | ||
| We're going to get more work done safer and we're going to keep these people around because they sure are bright. | ||
| These young kids we're hiring and are really our future. | ||
| All right, so in closing, transitions are a good thing, an opportunity always for us, because the new administrator, the new secretary, the new Congress is going to ask all of you, okay, this is an important mission. | ||
| I'm bought in, I support it. | ||
| What do you need from me? | ||
| So for the last of the topics, what things do you need to ensure the long-term success and accelerate the national security mission? | ||
| Tom, can we start with you? | ||
| Well, to be honest, the biggest thing is just the recognition and the articulation of the fact that it's important. | ||
| You know, certainly with a new team coming in, we'll be looking to them to articulate what their priorities are, as is always the case with the transition. | ||
| I'm sure there will be changes. | ||
| We don't yet know what they are. | ||
| But if we have a clear articulation that, yes, this matters, yes, I'm willing to lean in to enable you to be successful. | ||
| There will be a question of resources. | ||
| The blueprint is a great thing, but it also comes with a price tag. | ||
| And that is going to be a heavy lift. | ||
| And so we'll be looking to see the actions Congress takes to support it or not and the action the administration takes. | ||
| But I think if I look at the broader international landscape, it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where someone says, well, you know what, this whole deterrence thing probably isn't so important. | ||
| After all, really everything's breaking our way on the international scene, and I'm so glad that all these other actors are being cooperative and not seeking to under almine us. | ||
| No, maybe that'll happen, but I think it's unlikely. | ||
| James, to you. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with everything Tom said. | ||
| The funding is a very heavy lift, and it's absolutely essential if we're going to get our facilities back into the shape they need to be to support the modernization programs and also provide an environment that our employees want to work in. | ||
| But we also made a lot of progress on what's called the Unleash EMDI. | ||
| Helping out here, guys. | ||
| Unleashing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So enhanced mission delivery initiative. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We still got a ways to go. | ||
| I would suggest that we've got contingency in the 80-4 program because of a lot of hard work, but also trying to get the model right with regard to reviewing and reporting. | ||
| But we've got work to go. | ||
| We've shown with a couple demonstrators, I can't go into details here, that we can go incredibly fast when we get this right between the federal oversight, the project management, and the labs, plants, and sites execution. | ||
| So I would just say we need to keep on that path. | ||
| Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. | ||
| We've built a good platform, and we're starting to see the momentum building in the system. | ||
| People are starting to believe that when we say we will clear barriers and obstacles to allow you to go faster, that we really mean that. | ||
| And they're beginning to embrace that and really work in different ways across the laboratories, across the enterprise. | ||
| So I'm hopeful we'll be able to use that platform and continue that process to really lean in and accelerate. | ||
| I think we do have examples of areas where changes in how we operate can make a big difference. | ||
| You mentioned OSHA. | ||
| So using OSHA standards for commercial-like construction, a very sensible thing to do. | ||
| It lowers costs. | ||
| It opens the contractor pool more broadly. | ||
| Having that more broadly adopted, I think there are several things like that where we have ideas for streamlining the regulatory environment in ways that will really enable mission delivery in a more expeditious manner while still ensuring we do this work in the safe and secure manner and responsible manner that we have to in our business. | ||
| So I think there is a big opportunity there. | ||
| I guess I'll put in one last plug for what I think is a real opportunity. | ||
| We've been exploring different ways across our mission space to work with the private sector. | ||
| And I think the opportunity for us to learn how to build those kinds of partnerships, public-private partnerships in different areas of our missions is another place where I'd like to see us lean forward, think differently about risk, and really embrace the opportunity that we have when we bring those capabilities together. | ||
| Tremendous. | ||
| Thank you all. | ||
| And we do have about 10 minutes for questions. | ||
| So are there microphones on both sides of the room? | ||
| Anyone have a question? | ||
| What's your pick question? | ||
| I'm having a challenge looking into the lights. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Hi, Greg Miller, Los Alamos Study Group again. | ||
| Kim, you have a new mission in your superblock. | ||
| It will have a new security profile, and there was just an announcement in the Federal Register about environmental impact statement analysis for that. | ||
| Can you tell us why that's not being done in PF4 at Los Alamos? | ||
| So we're doing a supplemental site-wide environmental supplement to our site-wide environmental impact statement, which we just completed, to change the site posture to enable us to change the way we manage the material we already have on site. | ||
| So the intent is not to increase the amount of material we have on site, but it's very, because our material limits are so low, it's very difficult to do operations in the superblock because you have to move, every time you try to do a new operation, you have to move other material out. | ||
| So this is really a way to streamline operations. | ||
| You know, we lowered the categorization of the superblock. | ||
| We de-inventoried the facility. | ||
| I think that was the right decision for the nation. | ||
| Do very small-scale work making targets for Jasper gas gun experiments and for our NIF experiments as examples that we're not changing the kind of work that we're doing. | ||
| So it really is a material management shift that will make the facility much more efficient and cost-effective to operate. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yes, my name is Brenda Dillard, former Brenda Hunter. | ||
| I am president of a university, so I work with over 100 universities across the country. | ||
| I also work with MS Technology, NQA company out of Oak Ridge. | ||
| And we are in the digital transformation. | ||
| And Tom, we were at your site last week and happy to know that you guys, how far you're going along. | ||
| But my question to you guys, either one can answer, is how do we, from an NSA as well as all the production facilities and lab, how do we get this right in setting up the AutoTech, making sure that the security measures are in place, because it's not just, you know, bringing indoors next generation, but it's all of that. | ||
| And how do those systems work with some of our legacy systems that we have at some of our production facilities? | ||
| How do we make all that happen? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I think they should ask. | ||
| I think you should ask Laura tomorrow. | ||
| I mean, I would just say that this isn't her first rodeo at doing this. | ||
| I think she's the best one to answer it. | ||
| All right, other questions? | ||
| I see one in the back. | ||
| Hi, Shelly Mesh with Inside Defense. | ||
| I wanted to ask about, you're talking a lot about spare parts and needing maintenance and sustainment. | ||
| Your funding comes from Congress. | ||
| Those are typically not the most high-profile budget items. | ||
| How are you making sure that you're going to get the funding you need for those spares or maintenance and sustainment operations at your facilities? | ||
| So, you know, partly by just saying over and over again, we really need this. | ||
| And we've certainly been articulating those needs to NNSA. | ||
| I think that message has been received. | ||
| You know, to be honest, part of the reason we're in a bit of a pickle now is there were many years where the funds were not fully spent, and that does create a healthy degree of skepticism. | ||
| You know, do you really need the money when there's money been left on the table? | ||
| I would say we crossed that threshold several years ago. | ||
| You know, as we were ramping up, we kind of hit our pace and we began executing, and then all of a sudden that's when we found we've sort of hit the wall. | ||
| You know, it's just a fact of life that it's easier to articulate the case for a shiny new thing that's going to give you a qualitatively new capability. | ||
| It's hard to get people excited to say, you know, in order to do the things I did last year, next year, I'm going to need some more money because, you know, the klystrons are breaking and we don't have any spares or whatever it may be. | ||
| But, you know, that's just a story we have to keep telling. | ||
| And as I said, the thing that for me, I think, makes a pretty compelling argument is the fact that these facilities that we're relying on that we're now having to extend longer because it's going to take longer to get their replacements, they are in service of our on-alert deterrent every day. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, we all do the annual assessment letter, and when I look at the facilities that are required to do the analysis that supports that, it has a very direct effect in terms of our on-alert deterrent. | |
| And I think if we just keep explaining that to anyone who will listen, then hopefully we'll make the case. | ||
| Adding on to Tom, I learned in year two in this job that the only thing anyone reads that I write is the annual assessment letter. | ||
| And so I took this year the risk of moving all my facility issues to page two. | ||
| And I think a lot of people read it because we're getting a lot of questions about how we're going to keep Meso alive. | ||
| So I think it's working. | ||
| I think the last piece, I agree wholeheartedly with Tom. | ||
| We have to keep explaining to people why this is necessary. | ||
| And part of that is really showing what's in those buckets of money. | ||
| You know, when we talk about maintaining these facilities, what does that mean? | ||
| You know, the number of subsystems in a facility like the National Ignition Facility is incredible. | ||
| So it's easy to just see this big number and say, well, if I give you a little bit less, is that really okay? | ||
| But when you go through subsystem by subsystem by subsystem, it becomes clear where the shortfalls are. | ||
| And I think that transparency really helps people understand how seriously we take these budget exercises. | ||
| All right, we're at the end of our time, and I realize that we are standing between you and the cocktail party. | ||
| But let me wrap this up by just thanking the panelists for being here with us today. | ||
| Let's give them a round of applause. | ||
| And then before they get away, I really thanked them for the most important thing, and is doing this very, very difficult job in what they do each and every day to protect our national security. | ||
| So thank you for that. | ||
| It's an honor. | ||
| On Monday, a look at what Russian independent media says about Russian society and political trends. | ||
| From George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, watch live at 4 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. |