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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

The whole story can be shortened down to two sentences:

> Investigators traced a series of internal communications in which the specifications for “kitty litter/zeolite clay” were transformed into “kitty litter (clay),” the report says. Combined with inadequate technical review, this resulted in LANL workers filling waste containers with a mixture of nitrate salts and sWheat Scoop, a cat litter that is 100% wheat, according to its manufacturer.

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Removing "zeolite" is consistent with just about every popular piece of advice on how to write:

1. Don't use jargon.

2. Remove unnecessary words.

3. Write a third grade level.

So someone comes along and sees the phrase "kitty litter/zeolite clay" and decides that its author does not know how to write based on its author not following the rules and applies syntactic rules without understanding the semantics (in this case the semantics of nuclear chemistry).

Item 1 is especially bad because the whole intent of jargon is to be clear to readers of the same or similar technical level. There's an engineer at work who occasionally tries to harangue me into applying these rules to technical documents and emails to other engineers because she thinks they're "unclear." They're not unclear, she just doesn't have the technical aptitude in my field to read them.

Agreed. As anyone exposed to the media in general knows, we do have a very strong preference for "clear but mistaken" and "false as stated" utterances. Any nuance is quickly labeled a "mixed message" and eliminated - as if the universe never contained a mix of anything that one might want to talk about.

you'd think that at the level of nuclear chemistry, "kitty litter" would be considered a pretty inexact term for a very serious role.

Well, it is what you have to actually buy unless you want to pay far more.

Traditionally, it has been exact. Physicists are ordinary people and use ordinary language to talk to other physicists. It became inexact when the low bidder bought wheat waste and called it "kitty litter" and ignored "(clay)".

Um -- as someone who has bought Swheat Scoop for my cats for almost 20 years -- I can assure you it's not the low-cost option. Clay is much cheaper.

I'm not disagreeing. However, I would not be surprised if the price ratios at retail differ from those at bulk wholesale and at moments in the spot market. My suspicion is based on some experience with the spot market for fill dirt and the evidence here that kitty litter made from wheat byproducts was supplied by the low cost bidder and the premise that the low cost bidder was a rational economic actor.

I could believe that Swheat Scoop was the low bidder once someone in the purchasing chain had ruled out the clay options, but I'd be very surprised if any of the organic materials could compete with clay.

With fill dirt the way the market works is if some Owner has an unbalanced site where there's more cut than fill, then the fill dirt is a bargain because the Owner would otherwise have to pay to haul the dirt away. On the other hand, if tho Owner needing fill dirt heads down to his local dirt mine, the proprietor can stick to their asking price because the dirt in the dirt mine doesn't go bad.

My suspicion is that someone was sitting on a big pile of wheat waste, which unlike fill dirt is organic and probably goes bad and probably needs to be moved off the wheat processing lot for next week/month/year's wheat harvest...and the wheat waste (unlike fill dirt) probably needs to be disposed of properly in a sanitary landfill and that's some more expense.

I mean at some point, someone is probably paying to have the wheat waste hauled away, whereas zeolite and other clay minerals are typically mined deliberately.

My suspicion is based on some experience with the spot market for fill dirt and the evidence here that kitty litter made from wheat byproducts was supplied by the low cost bidder and the premise that the low cost bidder was a rational economic actor.

Your suspicion sounds plausible, but looks to be directly contradicted by the Department of Energy's post-investigation report. To the contrary of this being a decision made by the low cost bidder, the problems with the process started with a mistake in the specification that was produced by Los Alamos National Security LLC, the private company specifies the proper operating procedures at the national lab:

"When LANS began using this procedure to process nitrate salt wastes in September 2011, it did not perform a USQD [Undetermined Safety Questions Determination], as required, because the change from inorganic to organic absorbent was incorrectly determined to be an administrative (minor) change."

"In one particular instance, a conduct-of-operations SME [subject matter expert], working outside of his/her area of responsibility, added new text to DOP-0233 that included using organic kitty litter as an absorbent, as opposed to the inorganic zeolite material discussed previously in technical team meetings."

"In the previous example, the SME's addition of the text to DOP-0233, Section 10.6, which included the word 'organic', was submitted informally as a 'minor' comment, rather than an 'essential' comment that would have required explicit concurrence from the entire SME team."

Unless the report is wrong, or unless the SME who made the change was actually working in deep cover for a kitty litter producer with a surplus of wheat, this looks to be an error of knowledge and process, not a cost-cutting measure by a low bidder.

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/02/f29/Posting%20co...

It appears that organic was added alongside inorganic. Which means that the low bid was for organic litter. Having written specs, alternatives to established specifications are often proposed by vendors.

Normally for government specifications, opportunities to enjoy pitches by vendors to have their products added to the specification are not allowed due to the potential appearance of a conflict of interest. On the other hand, an LLC might not have quite as rigid a protocol...and establishing an LLC might even be done to avoid having rigid protocols around bidding and vendors.

Now I could be completely off base and a low level employee went cowboy all on their own due to some previous knowledge of organic kitty liter and the economics of its bulk availability. The center of the distribution when specs get changed to allow an alternative technology is more commonly customer eduction by vendors.

Writing "kitty litter/zeolite clay" certainly was bad style — it left ambiguous what the relation between "kitty litter" and "zeolite clay" is, which invited the editor to assume that they were synonyms and to just pick one.

Remember, kids, if you receive a sentence that's ambiguous, you can't edit it to make it less ambiguous if you don't have an extrinsic reason to know what was meant. Blindly editing can only destroy information, not create it (also known as the autocorrect problem).

Should have been written as 'Zeolite Clay conforming to Specification 239.11'

Specifying a generic or branded product for an off label use is just a bad bad idea. Because the manufacturer of kitty litter can't be counted to control for any properties other than those reflecting use in a cat box. Fatcat(tm) Unscented Kitty Litter might be fine until one batch shows up that's 95% zeolite clay / 5% sawdust.

This is exactly key. In GMP pharmaceutical manufacturing, you have to spell EVERYTHING out - chemical compound, the manufacturer, the batch. I'm quite surprised that the nuclear industry doesn't follow the same level of rigor - there ought to have been some sort of SOP document for which sorbents to mix with radioactive nitrates.

Which is one of the reasons government purchasing specifications are famously absurdly complicated.

First, if you really need zeolite clay you can't use the shortcut term since someone will complain to the IG that you stupidly overpaid and wasted the taxpayer's money.

Second, relatedly, some vendor will sue because you specified a "hammer" but didn't specify the material, thus overlooking their cheap plastic hammer.

And as a result we end up with the $600 toilet seat.

However, it's inconsistent with the training given in writing Technical Communications. Where

1. Jargon is acceptable

2. What words are "unnecessary" is quite context dependent

3. You write to your intended audience.

This is the exact opposite of what is taught in technical writing classes, however.

"zeolite clay" is not jargon, it's the exact material required.

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