The National Nuclear Security Administration on Tuesday issued a presolicitation notice for the next management and operations contract for its Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The notice comes just days after the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency said it is investigating the improper shipment of nuclear material from the laboratory to sister sites in California and South Carolina.
The NNSA plans to issue a draft request for proposal for the M&O contract on July 12 on the agency’s procurement website, as well as FedBizOpps and FedConnect. Industry comments and questions will be due by July 26 to [email protected]. The final RFP is expected in September.
The current contract has been held since 2006 by Los Alamos National Security LLC (LANS), a partnership of Bechtel National, BWX Technologies, AECOM, and the University of California. The contract ends on Sept. 30, 2018, with LANS having failed to secure several years of additional options. It is valued at about $2 billion annually, along with performance-based award fees.
That new deal is expected to cover a four-month transition, a five-year base period, and options for up to another half-decade.
There was no definitive word this week on whether the current management partnership would bid on the contract, either as LANS or in other configurations.
“We will evaluate the opportunity as we would any other, and look forward to the release of the draft request for proposals,” Bechtel spokesman Fred deSousa said by email Tuesday. “Our first priority continues to be helping the Laboratory complete its missions safely and efficiently.”
The University of California, which prior to 2006 had been the laboratory’s sole M&O contractor, said it would also review the request for proposals to determine its path forward. “The University of California (UC) is proud of its nearly 75-year association with the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a part of its public service mission,” Kimberly Budil, vice president for national laboratories, said in a prepared statement. “We remain committed to the stewardship of the exceptional science, technology, engineering and national security missions of the Laboratory now and into the future.”
A spokesman for BWX Technologies said Tuesday the company does not comment on potential or active contract procurements. AECOM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other major players in the DOE sphere also this week, including Honeywell and Fluor, also did not respond to calls regarding their interest in the Los Alamos contract.
Los Alamos National Security also holds the current “bridge” contract for environmental remediation services of the laboratory. The last of two options on contract expires on Sept. 30, and DOE’s Office of Environmental Management as of deadline Friday had not announced the holder of the follow-on procurement.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory is a multidisciplinary research facility known best for its work on the U.S. nuclear deterrent, including production of the plutonium cores for nuclear weapons. The 40-square-mile site northwest of Santa Fe employs about 11,200 personnel, more than 7,000 of whom work directly for Los Alamos National Security.
The laboratory has long been plagued by security and safety problems, which have been highlighted by a recent series of articles from the Center for Public Integrity. Los Alamos was also the point of origin of a container of radioactive waste that burst open underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in February 2014, forcing DOE’s transuranic waste storage mine to close for nearly three years.
On June 23, the NNSA said the laboratory had failed to follow proper procedure during the preceding week in shipping small amounts of special nuclear material to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.
The materials were packaged for shipment by ground transport, but the accompanying documents said they should go to their destinations by air. That is exactly what happened, in breach of federal regulations, the NNSA said.
The agency last week did not provide details of the incident, including how the material was to be used at the labs, but an update Monday to DOE’s Occurrence Reporting and Processing System (ORPS) shed light on the shipment to Lawrence Livermore.
The report says a LANL materials management shipper on June 16 “inadvertently shipped 100 grams of plutonium in a 9975 type B package via Fedex air freight to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).” Livermore officials alerted the packaging and transportation operations manager at Los Alamos the following Wednesday, after which the LANL official sent notifications to DOE personnel at the lab and headquarters.
“The shipment was received at LLNL with no impact to the material, personnel or the environment,” the ORPS update says.
These shipments are a regular part of the national laboratories’ work with nuclear materials, which for transport are placed in metal containers roughly the size of a 35-gallon drum. Each metal container has multiple layers of protection encompassing impact limiters and containment vessels.
The plutonium had actually been packaged on April 24, and was kept in storage until Livermore sent permission for the shipment. While such shipments generally involve a “schedule with a three-month overlook,” Livermore said it needed the material within three days, according to the ORPS update.
As the lab’s standard nuclear materials shipping company required seven days’ notice, Los Alamos materials managers used FedEx instead. “Due to the limited availability of resources and a demanding workload on the day of the shipment, verification checks of the material did not take place prior to shipment,” the ORPS report says.
It was not immediately clear whether FedEx had been alerted to the situation, according to the latest report. LANL’s packaging and transportation operations manager will prepare a report for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The National Nuclear Security Administration said Monday it would have no additional comment on the matter beyond the statement issued last week. The Los Alamos National Laboratory did not respond to a request for comment.
