ARLINGTON, VA. — The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will serve as a test-bed for some of the changes the National Nuclear Security Administration plans to make to the big site-management contracts of the future, an agency official said here.
At “the Livermore Field Office … we are actually right now executing what’s called a model contract,” James McConnell, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) associate principal deputy administrator said during a panel presentation at the Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. “We’re not going to be recompeting Livermore … but there are so many things we can do to make that contract better,” McConnell said.
Negotiations to modify the Livermore management and operations contract, held by the Lawrence Livermore National Security team led by the University of California and Bechtel National, began in 2022 “and we would like it to be done soon so that we can start reaping the benefits of it but it’s going to have to take the time it takes,” McConnell told the Monitor on the sidelines of the conference.
The immediate beneficiary of the negotiations, other than the Livermore management and operations contractor, would be the NNSA team putting together the solicitation for one of the agency’s biggest plums, the standalone management and operations contract for the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, McConnell said. That contract could hit the street in April for bids.
“The Livermore folks are feeding into the people who are putting together our proposal down the road for the Pantex contract because there won’t be that constraint on the next Pantex contract,” McConnell said. “So we can make the next Pantex contract everything that Livermore would want to have done.”
Interested parties had until Monday to respond to the NNSA’s request for information about the coming competition for the Pantex contract. After managing Pantex under the same contract as the Y-12 National Security Site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., since 2014, the NNSA is splitting the sites up. The agency planned a final solicitation for Pantex by April 24 and a draft solicitation as soon as March 10.
The impetus for starting negotiations at Livermore, McConnell said here Monday, was a 24-page report issued in 2022 by an internal agency panel with the moniker Enhanced Mission Delivery Initiative.
The panel, convened by NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby in January 2022 to create contracting and operational reforms the agency could put into place without congressional action, made 18 recommendations in its report, ranging from big steps such as switching all of NNSA’s decade-spanning site-management contracts to five-year deals with a five-year option to cultural shifts that would “reward risk taking” at the sites among federal and contractor staff.
The Pantex contract would be the first contract, and possibly the only contract, depending on how shifts in the political landscape affect senior NNSA leadership, to be written according to the recommendations in the Enhanced Mission Delivery Initiative’s report.
The NNSA has already put the report’s recommendations into place as best as it could for existing nuclear-weapon site management contracts, picking up just about every option available to the agency across the nuclear security enterprise.
The agency has likewise maxed out its options with Lawrence Livermore National Security, which now will be on site through September 2026, but until it comes time to put an entirely new contract on the streets for the San Francisco Bay Area design lab, NNSA’s options are limited.
The end product of the ongoing negotiations at Livermore could include condensing multiple safety addenda stapled to the contract over the years and scattered “10 pages apart in the document” into a single section for easy reference, allowing the NNSA and its contractors to “spend less time debating whether something really is a requirement or it’s just something that somebody asserted and nobody really checked on,” McConnell told the Monitor.
