The Department of Energy praised the prime contractor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for on-time work on nuclear warheads and bombs in fiscal 2017, but clipped some award fee dollars because of delays with electrical upgrades at the California weapons lab.
Lawrence Livermore National Security (LLNS) earned about $40 million in fees for 2017: almost 95 percent of the available total. Fixed fees made up about 40 percent of that. Of the remaining award fees, which are subject to the government’s judgment, LLNS nabbed about 90 percent, or roughly $23 million.
LLNS manages Livermore for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) under a contract awarded in 2007 and worth more than $1 billion annually over 19 years, including options. Among other things, the lab examines existing warheads to see how well — or not — they are aging, and runs high-energy physics experiments to simulate nuclear-weapon tests without nuclear explosions.
In a performance evaluation report dated Nov. 30 and uploaded to the NNSA’s website Thursday, the agency lauded LLNS for meeting or exceeding expectations for work in the last fiscal year on the W80, B83, W84, and W87 bombs and warheads the lab designed, plus its contribution to flight tests for the W78 warhead designed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
However, the NNSA dinged LLNS for falling behind on upgraded Lawrence Livermore’s electrical infrastructure. Specifically, the contractor lost some award-fee dollars because of delays to the long-planned Expand Electrical Distribution System, which is supposed to provide “a reliable alternate electrical feed to mission critical facilities” at the lab for at least 40 years, according to the NNSA’s 2018 budget request.
The Expand Electrical Distribution System project began in 2011 and was supposed to be done by October 2019. Last year, that date slipped to December 2020, and projected costs rose to about $34 million from roughly $27 million.
LLNS planned to hire a subcontractor to built the Expand Electrical Distribution System and, as recently as last year, thought construction would start in March of 2017. That month, however, LLNS decided the project “had not made sufficient progress” and that the prime needed to better understand “Departmental requirements” before beginning physical work.
The contractor is led by the University of California with senior industry partner Bechtel National and corporate teammates AECOM, BWX Technologies, and Battelle — nearly the same companies (minus Battelle) that partner to manage the NNSA’s Los Alamos National Laboratory as Los Alamos National Security.
