While no one was hurt and no special nuclear material was damaged, the outgoing prime contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory lost about $3 million in award fees in fiscal 2017 because it broke Department of Energy rules and shipped plutonium by plane instead of by truck.
In June 2017, Los Alamos National Security (LANS) used commercial cargo aircraft to ship plutonium to the department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
In January 2018, the mistake cost LANS about 30 percent of its available award fee — the company took home around $6 million in award fees instead of the nearly $9 million available — according to a letter the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sent LANS. The missive, dated Jan. 4, was uploaded to the NNSA’s website Thursday. It was attached to a more detailed performance evaluation report dated Nov. 9.
The airmail mishap came on the heels of arguably more serious nuclear safety lapses at the lab and brought glaring attention to Los Alamos as the government was preparing to choose a new contractor to run the storied nuclear weapons site for the next decade.
Combined, the incidents indicate “a programmatic breakdown in LANS’ safety management system,” wrote Jennifer Jung, the NNSA contracting official who signed the letter to LANS published this week.
The amount Jung deducted for the plutonium airmail mistake amounts to about 6 percent of the total fee available to LANS in 2017. Nearly all the awards available for the last fiscal year were fixed fees, so the contractor still took nearly $48 million of hte available $50 million.
Fiscal 2018 is the final year of LANS’ Los Alamos National Laboratory management and operations contract. The contractor has been on the job since 2006 and could have stayed in control at Los Alamos into the 2020s, had not an improperly packaged drum of transuranic waste from the lab caused a small explosion and a radiation leak deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., in 2014.
In 2011, as first reported last year by the non-profit Center for Public Integrity, personnel at LANL flirted with an accidental nuclear criticality by placing too many plutonium rods in close proximity to one another.
LANS is led by longtime Los Alamos manager the University of California, with senior industry partner Bechtel National. The other corporate partners are AECOM and BWX Technologies.
The NNSA expects to award the next Los Alamos management contract in April or May. Including options, the pact would cost about $20 billion over 10 years, with up to $50 million in annual award fees for the winner.
The University of California and University of Texas have confirmed they are bidding for the follow-on work. Texas A&M University has confirmed it is seeking a role as well. Of the corporate LANS partners, AECOM is said to be sitting out the competition, while BWX Technologies has said it is interested in the work. Bechtel has declined to comment on its intentions.
