Rottler to Take Over as Deputy Lab Director in March
NS&D Monitor
12/5/2014
Stephen Rottler, the head of Sandia National Laboratories’ California campus, is taking over as the lab’s new deputy director and executive vice president for National Security Programs. Rottler will replace longtime lab executive Jerry McDowell, who will retire in July, on March 6, 2015, lab Director Paul Hommert said this week. Rottler has served as the head of Sandia’s California campus and its Energy and Climate unit since February 2013, and previously was the lab’s chief technology officer and vice president of Science and Technology. He oversaw work on nuclear weapons stewardship; defense against weapons of mass destruction; combustion, transportation and hydrogen energy research; biology; and advanced computational and information systems as the head of the lab’s California campus.
Hommert also said Gary Sanders will take over as the vice president of Weapons Engineering and Product Realization, replacing Bruce Walker, who is retiring in March after 37 years at the lab. Sanders worked most recently as the deputy chief engineer for nuclear weapons and the director of weapon systems engineering at Sandia’s Albuquerque campus. Before arriving at Sandia, he was the principal technical advisor for nuclear plans and policies to the Air Force secretary. He also has worked at the Department of Energy and with the Air Force Office of Nuclear and Counterproliferation in the Pentagon.
Sandia Work Planning and Control Still Needs Work, DOE Review Finds
NS&D Monitor
12/5/2014
Sandia National Laboratories still has to make progress in improving safety controls, according to a targeted review of the lab’s work planning and control by the Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments, the results of which were released in mid-November. The review found that while Sandia is making progress in revamping its work planning and control in the wake of several workplace accidents, Sandia’s corporate processes don’t provide clear guidance in some important areas. Specifically, the review said that Sandia’s guidelines for failure mode analysis and safety case initiative requirements allowed for lab divisions to come up with their own processes and procedures and “did not provide for sufficient corporate-level review and assessment, resulting in significant variability in approach and quality across SNL organizations.”
In a statement, Sandia spokesman Jim Danneskiold said the lab welcomed the report’s conclusions that changes at the lab were “appropriately targeted” and “contributing to safer operations.” Danneskiold added: “Sandia has instituted a rigorous process to improve performance assessments including specific criteria to evaluate Work Planning and Controls. Now that all activities have been reviewed and safety cases completed, the divisions are taking the next step to initiate independent reviews to ensure quality. In addition, training and tools appropriate for hazard assessment to include failure modes analysis have been expanded.”
