Come fall, Canadian-born, transplant-Tennessean Thomas Mason will be the latest in a line of Los Alamos National Laboratory directors stretching back to J. Robert Oppenheimer.
But as of this week, when he took time after a Capitol Hill visit to speak with Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, he stressed he was only president and chief executive officer of Triad National Security, which recently clinched a coveted National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) contract to manage the northern New Mexico lab for perhaps the next 10 years.
During that span, the former director of the Oak Ridge National Lab will be responsible for whipping Los Alamos into good enough shape to produce the United States’ first war-usable plutonium pits — nuclear-warhead cores — since 2011. The lab is on the hook for 30 pits a year starting in 2026, and maybe more than that in the 2030s.
So, no pressure, Mason is stepping right into the middle of a major construction project in the middle of a roughly $2.5-billion-a-year lab that is the beating heart not only of today’s nuclear deterrent, but of tomorrow’s.
Who: Thomas Mason
What: President & CEO of Triad National Security: a team of Battelle, Texas A&M University, the University of California (founding partners), with integrated industry subcontractors Fluor Federal Services and Huntington Ingalls Industries/Stoller Newport News Nuclear, and small business partners Longenecker & Associates, TechSource, Merrick & Co., and Strategic Management Solutions.
Where: The Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M.
What sort of change will Triad bring to Los Alamos, and what does it mean to install an organization like Battelle as the lab’s lead management partner?
Battelle isn’t the lead management management partner. Triad is an equal partnership among three founding members. And as you know, Triad is a nonprofit. The three founding members of this special purpose, limited-liability company are all nonprofit, with two state universities that share an interest in education, and research and economic development, national services. And Battelle, as a charitable trust, was set up specifically to kind of realize the benefits for humanity of research and what we now today call tech transfers.
If it’s an equal partnership, why is a Battelle employee the lab director? And why isn’t anyone from Texas A&M University a senior manager at Triad?
We have not carved up the scope of the lab and said somehow, well Texas A&M, you go do this bit, Battelle, you do this bit, University of California over here, HII [Huntington Ingalls Industries] over there. Triad as an entity is fully responsible for the whole scope of the lab. And as president and CEO of Triad — and eventually lab director, once we get through transition — I’m the kind of single point of accountability for that.
What the parents provide is a governance role, so we have a board and there’s membership on the board from each of the parties involved. They appoint and fire the lab director, so I care about what they think.
And I think one of the reasons we were successful — and don’t just believe [me], we heard about this in the debrief — is we have a really exceptional leadership team.
So to the A&M question, they have a role on Triad’s board and exercise control in that way?
Yes, and through the board committees.
You ran Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which does not have a nuclear-weapons mission. What qualifies the former director of a lab with no nuclear-weapons mission to run a nuclear-weapons lab?
A lot of the challenges in the stockpile have to do with understanding materials, using modeling and simulation in order to provide the technical basis for qualifying the stockpile, understanding how experiments that one does with materials in a nuclear environment relate to those computer models. That’s something I’m quite familiar with.
Oak Ridge has nuclear facilities with High Flux Isotope Reactor, the hot cells, and does a fair amount of fairly sensitive classified work, so that kind of environment is certainly not unfamiliar. And I have a background in capital projects as well, having led SNS [Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge]. So I think I’ve got a lot of relevant experience.
And then probably the most important thing is, if you look at the leadership team as a whole, although I don’t have a nuclear weapons pedigree as a designer, we have an absolutely outstanding nuclear weapons team with people like Bob Webster, Michael Bernardin, and James Owen who know the stockpile inside and out. That will be part of that enterprise that informs me as I do the annual certification letter, which is probably the most important responsibility that any director of any of the three NNSA labs has.
How much fee can Triad earn each year?
I’m not going to comment on the particulars of what we proposed because that’s a competition-sensitive thing. I would say that for us, anyway, it’s not really a fee-motivated thing. We’re not for-profit companies, we don’t have shareholders who are demanding a return, and the net fee that would be available once you’ve paid for the expenses associated with managing the contract and so forth is something that gets plowed back into the not-for-profit component of each of the parties. The motivation for getting involved in running a lab like Los Alamos has more to do with the mission and the importance of the mission. We hope we do a good job because we want to do a good job. That will be manifest in the variable part of the award fee.
Is Triad, as a nonprofit, exempt from New Mexico’s state gross receipts tax?
It turns out it’s a little more complicated than that. That’s one reason that I’ve been very careful to make sure we understand this before we make a definitive statement. Knowing how important it is to the community, the last thing I want to do is say something that’s wrong. There’s actually a difference between nonprofit and tax-exempt. They’re not the same thing, even though it seems many people assume that they are. The three Triad parents are all tax-exempt for different reasons. But it turns out, under New Mexico state law, that doesn’t automatically mean that Triad is. So this is a matter of New Mexico state law and how it applies to a multimember LLC. Long before the transition in November, we’ll have to get that sorted out: how an entity with the legal structure Triad has — a multimember LLC with for-profit subcontractors — is treated under the tax law.
A representative of another bidder for this contract insisted that Los Alamos needed industry leadership, because academics and scientists don’t understand how to run a production facility for something such as plutonium pits. How do you answer that statement?
That’s why we have the subcontractors we have on the team, because there are capabilities that exist in industry that we need to tap into. So HII specifically on the nuclear manufacturing, with the experience they have in terms of the naval reactors program [and] production activities at Savannah River. Fluor, in the case of capital projects. There are a number of capital projects that are underway at Los Alamos. That’s another area that has been a concern to NNSA. It also relates to some of the discussions around PF-4, because part of the campaign to get to 30 pits per year involves a number of capital improvements. And those capital improvements have to be carefully aligned to an ongoing production schedule. We’ve got to make those capital improvements while we’re doing the ramp up of production, and also while we’re using PF-4 as an R&D facility as well.
And then we have also three small businesses that are included as subcontractors. In that case, it’s more for particular sort of human expertise, you know; people that they have access to that can assist us in areas like some of the project management stuff, in the case of Longenecker. TechSource has a lot of sort of historical expertise in the plutonium manufacturing business. Merrick-SMSI is a joint venture that’s going to assist in some of the capital projects work. Merrick’s got a lot of experience with things like hot-cell designs.
How can Triad’s organization — nonprofit leads and for-profit, integrated subcontractors — create the cultural change at Los Alamos that NNSA was looking for in the contract competition you all just won?
We’ve made some changes in the way the lab is organized. One of the probably most significant is that for the high-hazard mission-critical facilities, like the PF-4 facility where the pit work is done, like the LANSCE [Los Alamos Neutron Science Center] accelerator, DARHT [Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility], we have put responsibility for operating those facilities within the line organizations responsible for delivering on missions safely and securely — and not separated that out as a separate activity where you have kind of a landlord-tenant model, where there’s someone who sort of maintains the facility and some people who come in and work in it, and there’s not a single point of accountability.
In the high-hazard mission-specific facilities, you cannot separate the work that’s being done from the safety envelope and the safety basis that the facility is under. They’re one in the same. And we’ve seen this in other labs. Certainly I saw it during my time at Oak Ridge, at Idaho, where there were challenges that arose because you had disconnects between the people who felt like they were responsible for running the facility and the people who felt like they were responsible for doing work in the facility.
But there have been areas of sustained excellence [at Los Alamos] even as there have been real problem areas. So we’ve tried to reflect that in our organizational approach and then also in the people that we’ve brought. We have some people who have very long experience at Los Alamos, know the institution, know its mission, in areas where things have generally been going extremely well. We don’t want to disrupt that when we assume responsibility for the lab.
The tagline, almost, for our proposal was, “change where needed and continuity where critical.”
Can you give me an example of how you plan to apply this management model at Los Alamos? Specifically, an example contrasting how something is done at the lab now and how it will be done differently when Triad is on the job.
Probably the simplest way to explain it is to give you an example from a lab where we have made such a change. So at Oak Ridge, I had a reactor there called the High Flux Isotope Reactor, which is a hazard category one nuclear facility. Highly enriched fuel for its core, and an important mission in fundamental science and isotope production and various other things. It was really struggling in the early 2000s. It was not operating reliably, for a whole host of reasons, in addition to just aging infrastructure.
It was at the time operating in this mode where there was one set of people who said “we operate the reactor.” There was another set of people who said, “well, we’re doing some experiments in the reactor.” It was difficult to identify, you know, the individual, the organization responsible for delivering the science and engineering and production outcomes out of this facility.
Some years the reactor would have operational uptime close to 50 percent of the planned time. Completely unacceptable.I believe that had we not corrected the situation, the Department of Energy probably would have shut the facility down. So what we did was we combined that under a single organization with an individual in charge — Kelly Beierschmitt, who’s going to Triad’s deputy director of operations at Los Alamos — and turned it around.
And it was something that had to be worked with the department because there were investments in the infrastructure that were necessary to improve the aging infrastructure. They had to be coordinated closely with the ongoing operational activities so that they weren’t disrupting one another, and it all had to be done within the safety envelope of a hazard category one nuclear facility where there is no margin for error.
So after all the years running Oak Ridge, why take this job?
I really enjoyed my time at Oak Ridge. It was a privilege that I never imagined that I would have, to do that. But, you know, I think I was ready for a new challenge, and this is a new challenge. I’m sort of looking forward to it. It draws on things that I’ve learned and feel like I know well and adds to that a set of things that I’ve got a learning curve on, and that’s always exciting, when you’re learning new things. And it’s an important institution. And I think, particularly in the areas that we talked about where some change is needed, I think it’s important that we get that right. That’s important to the nation. And it’s also important that we don’t screw up the areas that are going well. It’s pretty high stakes. It matters. And that’s exciting.
