Rocky Flats Benefits Changes—Another Personal Story

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To frequent readers, the recent commentaries have been in line with the title of this web site, “RockyFlatsFacts.com.” This may be the last of the commentaries about Rocky Flats until we hear more about changes to retiree benefits that the Department of Energy (DOE) is requiring. People who have what they think are “life-time benefits” from a contractor to a government agency should read what is happening to the people who worked at Rocky Flats and develop a “healthy cynicism.”

Several responses to the commentaries previously posted on the changes have been something to the effect, “This can’t be. I worked with dangerous materials. However, they promised me good health care benefits when I retired.” The first warning about the DOE’s willingness to renege on that promise was posted last week by a person who had their health care benefits removed by an administrative action even while they continued to be employed at Rocky Flats. DOE of course did not take the action directly to eliminate the “promised benefits.” They established a contract that required a contractor to take that action.

I received a letter from a reader dated December 1, 2000 addressed to “Retiree or Surviving Spouse.” It explained that DOE had directed Kaiser-Hill not to make any changes for salaried employees who retired before July 1, 1995 or their surviving spouses. The letter also included a memo from the DOE manager saying that there will be no changes and that “…post 1995 retiree benefits will be addressed in “…DOE forthcoming policy…” I am certain people are digging through their files to find information such as this as they contemplate how to protect their benefits. Continue reading →

The Power and Fun of Mathematical Thinking

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How Not To Be WrongHow Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg is a fun book to read; perhaps surprising since the topic is mathematics. Ellenberg begins by saying the seemingly pointless drills primary school students complain of are akin to practice in sports. This hooked me immediately, since I think too many people believe you somehow “understand” math when you read a textbook and then can “do it”.  Ellenberg says “if you want to play soccer… you’re going to be spending lots of boring weekends on the practice field. There’s no other way.” It’s the same with math. An ability to perform basic operations is important to thinking since, as he observes, it would be hard to write a sonnet if you had to look up the spelling of each word as you worked.

Ellenberg does object to some of the way math is taught. Calculating “is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense – or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place – requires a guiding human hand… A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.”

His engaging style is evident throughout the book. I laughed out loud several times, and I urge you to read the footnotes – they’re often funny. For example, when introducing Leonard Jimmy Savage, a pioneer of decision theory and Bayesian statistics, Ellenberg adds this footnote: “Savage… at one point spent six months living only on pemmican in order to prove a point about Arctic exploration. Just thought that was worth mentioning.” Continue reading →

Hatchet Man

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Wikipedia says the term originally was used to describe an axeman serving in a U.S. military unit. “Towards the end of the 19th century, the phrase was used to describe a Chinese assassin who carried a handleless hatchet…”  The common current use is to describe a person who performs unpleasant tasks such as firing people for a superior. It is also used in sports to describe someone who is given the role of retaliating against opposing players.

Rocky Flats Benefit Changes – Another in a String of Reductions

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This blog was started to document the truth about the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Rocky Flats Plant, which purified and fabricated plutonium and other parts for nuclear weapons at a relatively small site sixteen miles northwest of Denver. Last week, RF_Alum posted on changes to retirement benefits for these “Cold War Warriors”. This week I will explain how I lost my retirement benefits, despite twenty-two years of service at the plant.

At the time, the retirement calculation used at DOE sites considered both years of service and age of the employee, so when I left in 2003 I would have qualified for a full retirement package except for one problem: Twenty months short of earning my retirement, I was laid off from the prime-contractor and shifted to a job with a subcontractor (or “third tier” company).  Time with such a subcontractor didn’t “count”.  The day I was laid off, the Human Resources representative handed me my twenty-year service award, thanked me for my loyalty, and held her breath hoping I wouldn’t explode.

I thanked the nice HR lady (it wasn’t her fault) and left her office shaking my head.  The next day I reported to my subcontractor job.  The DOE still wanted my labor, but they didn’t want to follow through on the promise of retirement benefits that had been part of my compensation package for twenty years.

The DOE had wanted to keep turn-over rates low. The promised retirement encouraged employees like me to stay at the Flats, and this benefited the nation since hiring, paying for security clearance investigations, and developing employee expertise cost a lot of money.

America’s needs changed when the Cold War fizzled out.  Continue reading →

The Manhattan Project: Bioscience and the Atom Bomb

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manhattan-projectThis small book by Jeff Hughes explores how science in the twentieth century changed everything as it spread from universities to the government and to the military. It has good information about the Manhattan Project in “condensed form,” but it spends time and words on the wisdom of “Big Science.”  The Manhattan Project was symbolic of the greatest change of all; “…science’s growth in scale, scope, and cost as it transformed from …small groups or individuals into…”Big Science”—a large-scale enterprise that is carried out by multidisciplinary and multinational groups of researches, cost enormous sums, demanded massive institutions of its own, and often represents a significant fraction of national budgets.” The Project brought together American, British, Canadian, and refugee European scientists to design and build the world’s first atomic bombs. It employed 130,000 people, cost $2 billion, and changed the world forever.

The book gives a brief history of the scientists who began to unlock the mysteries of the atom. Henri Becquerel accidently discovered that uranium had “spontaneous emission” recorded on a photographic plate. Marie Curie suggested the name “radioactivity.” Earnest Rutherford collaborated with Frederick Soddy and many others to work out the theory of radioactive decay by emission of alpha, beta, and gamma. Hans Geiger developed methods for measuring the emissions. Enrico Fermi and co-workers discovered that elements bombarded with neutrons could be turned into isotopes of other elements. Otto Hahn and Fritz Stassman reported they had apparently produced barium by bombarding uranium with neutrons. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch deducted that “a splitting” had been achieved. Frisch conferred with a biologist who explained that biological cells dividing was called “fission,” and the term stuck. Researchers around the world began replicating the results. Continue reading →

Butterfingers

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The candy bar by this name was one of my favorites when I was a youngster, but the term is described by the Phrase Finder as “A name playfully applied to someone who fails to catch a ball or lets something slip from their fingers.” I was surprised that Charles Dickens used the term in The Pickwick Papers written in 1836. “At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations of ‘Ah, ah! – stupid- Now, butter-fingers’.” The Phrase Finder points out there was reference to the term as early as 1615, when it was used to describe “…someone likely to drop things – as if their hands were smeared with butter, like a cook’s.”