Although the soon-to-be-retired Charles McMillan, director of the the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory now only through December, has two deputies, the order of succession at the northern New Mexico nuclear-weapon facility will officially remain a mystery at least until later this year.
McMillan announced Tuesday he would step down in December after six years in the top spot at LANL, and at Los Alamos National Security (LANS), the lab’s management and operations contractor. The only public timeline for replacing McMillan came not from LANS, but from DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which in its own press release said it would “work closely” with LANS’ board of governors to identify McMillan’s successor “in the late fall.”
Directly under McMillan on the LANS organization chart is Richard Kacich, the deputy laboratory director. Kacich, who has a background in nuclear utilities, decommissioning, and cleanup, came to LANS from the partnership’s main industry team member, Bechtel — where his jobs included project operations manager for the Waste Treatment Plant at DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
Added to the LANS organization chart only Thursday is McMillan’s other deputy, William “Scott” Gibbs: deputy laboratory director for mission assurance. Gibbs was very recently rehired — his first day back was Tuesday — from what turned out to be a brief retirement from the lab. Gibbs left LANL in May 2014 as associate director for threat identification and response after spending parts of 30 years at the lab in various other roles.
However, neither man’s proximity in the pecking order to McMillan is a clear indicator of his probability to succeed the longtime national lab hand for the final 10 months of LANS’ $2-billion-a-year contract.
McMillan himself — a nuclear physicist and multi-instrumentalist who lists the recorder among his specialities — ascended to the top spot at LANL from the position of principal associate lab director for the weapons program in 2011. At that point, LANS had been on the job five years.
There are five principal associate lab directors at LANL today.
As LANS begins what looks to be the final game of musical chairs around the director’s office, DOE is preparing the final solicitation for a new 10-year management and operations contract. An award is expected early next year.
LANS is a consortium led by longtime lab operator University of California and an industry group headed by Bechtel and including AECOM and BWX Technologies. The team’s contract had options that would have kept the group in charge of the lab until the middle of next decade, but DOE elected not to pick those options up after a series of safety snafus on McMillan’s watch.
The final straw for LANS came in 2014, when a poorly packaged barrel of plutonium-contaminated transuranic waste from the laboratory burst open at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., and leaked radiation into the mine. That forced DOE to close its only permanent underground disposal site for transuranic waste for nearly three years.
McMillan was also in the director’s office in 2013, when nuclear safety lapses prompted the contractor to suspend operations at the lab’s crucial Plutonium Facility for three years. The facility figures significantly into U.S. nuclear weapon modernization plans put in place by the Barack Obama administration. Under those plans, the Plutonium Facility would become the sole producer of plutonium pits: the fissile cores of nuclear warheads.
Most recently, just months before McMillan publicly announced his retirement, LANS was dinged for air-mailing plutonium to the director’s old employer, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The material is supposed to be shipped by ground only.
In prepared remarks to all hands this week, McMillan struck an optimistic tone about the future. He touted the lab’s contributions to national security, which he said “have strengthened our nuclear weapons and global security mission work and paved the way for an enduring future for Los Alamos National Laboratory.”
The lab, McMillan added, is “on the right trajectory for continued success in the decades to come.”
