The Energy Department as of this week had yet to release a solicitation for the next 10-year contract to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico.
DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) released a draft solicitation in July, which said the final solicitation for the next management and operations pact for the nuclear weapons lab would be out in September.
A week into October, there is no official update to speak of — other than outgoing LANL Director Charles McMillan’s public pronouncement in September that the request for proposals might not hit the street until this month.
Sources in New Mexico and Washington this week had no clearer idea when the contract might go out to bid than they did in August, when DOE was still targeting a September release.
“It’s always a month out,” one of these people told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
An NNSA spokesperson offered no concrete timetable for the final solicitation, which the agency said was delayed after the draft proposal drew “a significant level” of industry interest.
“As a result, NNSA is still working through additional public inquiries,” the NNSA spokesperson wrote in an email Thursday. “We expect to finish that process soon, and publish the final RFP [request for proposal] shortly thereafter.”
Incumbent Los Alamos National Security holds the current contract until Sept. 30, 2018. The University of California-led consortium has been on the job since 2006 under a deal worth about $2 billion per year. The NNSA in 2014 decided not to pick up further options on the pact after a series of nuclear safety mishaps at the lab.
Only a few entities have confirmed, or all but confirmed, that they will be in the hunt to manage LANL for the next decade.
The University of California, which managed LANL alone from the 1940s to the early 2000s, was the first to signal its intent publicly. In August, Janet Napolitano, the University of California system’s president, visited LANL and told workers there the university wanted to continue managing the 70-plus year-old weapons lab. In September, Napolitano told the university’s Board of Regents she would seek permission to bid on the next contract.
At the same time, University of California Regent Norman Pattiz — who recently announced he would step down as chairman of the board’s national labs committee while remaining a regent — said the system would seek industry partners other than those who are teaming on Los Alamos National Security. Those are senior industry partner Bechtel National, plus AECOM and BWX Technologies.
The University of Texas has also signaled it will prime an effort to manage LANL. In September, the Austin-based system’s Board of Regents approved spending $4.5 million to prepare a bid. The university was part of a team with Lockheed Martin that bid, but lost, on the LANL management contract awarded to Los Alamos National Security in 2006.
The University of New Mexico has also said it is interested in the next LANL management contract, though it has not said whether it would lead its own bid or join another. In 2016, the school finished a runner-up in the competition to manage the NNSA’s Sandia National Laboratories, joining a Boeing-Battelle-led team that lost out to Honeywell’s wholly owned National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia.
All the industry partners on the incumbent, except AECOM, attended one-on-one procurement briefings with DOE at the lab in August, according to NNSA records.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory employees roughly 11,200 people on a 40-square-mile campus north of Santa Fe, with a roughly $2.5 billion annual budget. Its mission focuses on national security, but covers research on everything from the climate to nanotechnology. It would remain the primary production facility for plutonium pits, the cores of nuclear weapons, under the ongoing U.S. nuclear modernization program.
