Uncertainty about when the current management and operations contract at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will end could soon be resolved, a senior official said this week.
“We are discussing with the lab exactly when we may be transitioning their contract,” Kim Davis Lebak, manager of the National Nuclear Security Administration Field Office at Los Alamos, told a group of community leaders Tuesday at a meeting in Santa Fe. “These discussions are going on right now and we hope to have resolution on that very soon.”
Los Alamos National Security – a consortium consisting of Bechtel, the University of California, BWXT Government Group, and AECOM – has held the contract since 2006, before which the university was the sole M&O contractor. But LANL Director and LANS President Charles McMillan announced last year that due to performance deficiencies the management and operating contract would be recompeted and awarded by October 2017, unless the contract was extended for another year.
The transition to a new principal contractor at LANL would mostly affect departing senior officials associated with Los Alamos National Security. But management changes have repercussions throughout the organization. For the majority of the science and technical professionals, support staff, and craftspeople who will remain, reassignments of responsibilities and personal adjustments are typical.
Apart from these changes, McMillan said at the same LANL community leaders meeting that the lab expects the aging workforce and natural attrition to replace some 2,000 jobs over the next four years, representing about one of every five employees at the nuclear weapons laboratory.
Another major change has to do with the environmental program at LANL. Just over a year ago, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz shifted oversight of legacy cleanup operations at the lab from the NNSA to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management after a LANL waste container erupted and released radiation at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in southern New Mexico. The remediation program, funded with most of LANL’s $185 million annual cleanup budget, is now overseen by EM under a temporary bridge contract with LANS. Lab employees and subcontractors continue to do the work, but they are now under EM’s supervision.
“The way it was set up originally, we were going to transition our EM contract and the M&O was going to stay,” said Doug Hintze, EM LANL field office manager, during an interview on the sidelines of the community meeting. “Now we’re trying to see where they’re going, because that is probably my biggest concern.”
The transfer of authority appeared fairly straightforward at first. EM would build up a staff to manage the bridge contract with LANS and address near-term legacy cleanup tasks. The bridge contract can be extended through September 2017, by which time a new provider was supposed to be solicited under a new contract to perform the larger environmental cleanup work for up to 10 years. NNSA would remain in charge of the M&O contractor, with responsibility for remediation of new waste in consultation with EM.
But then, a few months after Hintze arrived at LANL last year, McMillan announced the coming competition for the management contract. The problem is that the nuclear cleanup work in a nuclear security environment is a complicated business with serious risks to the health and safety of the workforce and the public. Each personnel group may be exposed to occupational accidents, explosions, spills, or dangerous mistakes by the other group. It’s the way they work together that is key. A cleanup contractor chosen for the work may not have a resilient organizational structure or backup systems or emergency equipment, for example, that can complement rather than duplicate the M&O contractor’s resources.
“The good thing is that I’ve experienced that at another site,” he said. “I understand what you have to look at that in terms of the timing.” You have to start identifying the gaps well ahead of time, he said.
His frame of reference stems from his 22 years at the DOE nuclear facilities, most recently the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where he served in many senior management positions, including business, finance, and waste disposition. As Hintze told a DOE EM publication in a recent interview, SRS has some different dynamics than LANL, because EM is the site landlord, while NNSA is the tenant. “It’s the reverse of what you have here at LANL.”
In 2008 and 2009, SRS split off its cleanup program from the main M&O contract during a period when the management contractor had changed. In that case, the new management contractor came in and became established for a year before the cleanup provider began work on the high-level waste project at SRS. “So you could manage all those interface issues because you didn’t try to split everything up at the same time,” Hintze said. “That’s my greatest lesson learned, is that you don’t want to do it all at the same time here.”
Hintze said he is keeping a close eye on the timing for the Los Alamos M&O contract award, with the idea that his organization could possibly bring in the new EM contractor while LANS is still managing LANL.
