Bids on the next management and operations contract for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory are due in a matter of days. Texas A&M University is in the hunt, but even at the 11th hour, the university refuses to provide any details about the role it hopes to play at the storied nuclear weapons laboratory over the next 10 years.
Will A&M lead a bid? Join a team? Who are its partners?
The university — less than a year removed from a failed bid to run the Sandia National Laboratories as part of a team led by Battelle and Boeing — will not say.
Nor will Marvin Adams: the A&M nuclear engineering professor who is CC’ed on so many high-level university conversations about nuclear weapons programs overseen by DOE’s semi-independent National Nuclear Security Administration — though he believes the university’s reputation for public service gives it an advantage over the competition.
When he’s not teaching a range of nuclear engineering and physics courses at Texas A&M, Adams directs the university’s Institute for National Security Education & Research: the in-house shop that “basically coordinates Texas A&M collaborations with the NNSA labs,” he said.
Adams came to Texas A&M as an assistant professor in 1992 from DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where he had worked since receiving his doctorate in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan in 1986.
But “I never really completely left the weapons program,” Adams said with a nod at his longstanding membership in various Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia advisory groups.
Days before institutional rivals University of California and University of Texas were expected to bid on a Los Alamos management pact expected to be awarded in April or May (bids are due Dec. 11), Adams spoke over the phone with Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
What are you up to right now at Texas A&M?
Mostly, I’m just a regular old professor in nuclear engineering. I also direct the Institute for National Security Education & Research. That’s kind of a part-time effort. I’ve been the director of that institute since it was formed in 2007. It basically coordinates Texas A&M collaborations with the NNSA labs.
How else are you involved with the NNSA weapons complex and national labs?
I’ve continued as a consultant at Livermore, and also as a consultant at Los Alamos and Sandia.
Also, Texas A&M University is an affiliate of Lawrence Livermore National Security: the management and operations contractor for Livermore. I am the Texas A&M point of contact for that affiliation. We’re not a management or fee-sharing partner.
So, you provide scientific and technical consultation for the agency and its contractors?
Saying that lab staff are contractors is a little bit misleading to people who don’t really know how the labs work. These are career employees who have devoted their lives to the nuclear-weapons stockpile and other lab missions, regardless of whose name is at the top of the list as the management and operations contractor.
These people don’t think of themselves as contractors and they don’t behave like contractors. They’re professional public servants, basically.
So I give advice to technical people who are in the trenches trying to help solve hard technical problems. They would bristle to be referred to as contractors.
Texas A&M has been tight-lipped about its involvement in the ongoing competition to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Is the university leading a bid? Part of a bid? Are you involved with the bid?
I can’t tell you whether or not we’ve joined a team or if we did who the partners would be. I can’t tell you any more details about what roles I might be playing if we are part of a team. I can’t talk about whether or not I would be proposed as a key personnel, or whether I would be part of a proposal writing team or anything like that. I can’t go into the details about my role.
I can tell you, though, that when these things come up, I’m part of the conversation. I participate in the conversations.
Why is A&M qualified to run the Los Alamos National Laboratory? What would the university’s role be at the lab?
If we did join a management team for Los Alamos, here is the high-level view: we run a $4.5-billion-a-year university system. That includes 11 universities, seven state agencies, and an awful lot of high-hazard research and development facilities.
We train first responders to work safely in hazardous environments, including radiation environments. We train an average of about 60,000 first responders a year.
If you look at why Los Alamos National Security [or LANS, the incumbent Los Alamos management contractor] is being fired, and why the contract is being recompeted, a lot of it has to do with operations in high-hazard facilities. That includes some criticality safety issues in the Plutonium Facility. It’s debatable whether there were any real health hazards or real threats to criticality, but the fact is that the operations out there have been in the news for not adhering to their own practices and procedures and regulations.
We at Texas A&M have recently partnered with Los Alamos management to start a criticality safety training and education program here with a pipeline to the lab. So we’re going to try and help them solve that criticality-safety personnel problem and culture problem.
Of the current Los Alamos National Security partners — the University of California, AECOM, Bechtel, and BWX Technologies — which is the closest analog to A&M?
I don’t think there is one. There is one thing that A&M would bring, and I guess UC could argue this too: this university was basically founded on public service. In particular, service in national security is something that Texas A&M University has never shied away from.
But the University of California has run, or helped run, Los Alamos for the past 70 years or so. How can A&M compete with that experience?
There’s no university that can come close to UC’s experience, and there’s not even really another company, including UC’s current partners on LANS. Their current partners have some experience now managing nuclear weapons labs and in particular the design-physics labs, which are a little different. I will not claim that Texas A&M University has that kind of experience.
But along with UC’s record of experience, of course, comes a record of some failures. There have been failures, in particular, in operations. And now the question becomes, if you’re a selection board, do you go with somebody who has experience but possibly questionable past performance? Or do you go with somebody who doesn’t have that kind of directly relevant experience, but has better past performance in things that are arguably similar?
Or, do you perhaps find somebody, some team, that combines some operational experience that you would consider highly relevant with past performance that you consider to be excellent?
So, the selection board’s going to have a tough job.
Some people think it’s a very good idea to have a for-profit company manage a weapons lab. Some people think it’s a very bad idea. Which camp are you in?
When I dug into this, my understanding is that it has less to do with whether the entity is legally for-profit or not-for-profit and more to do with where the incentives are placed on the manager. And in either model you can get it right or get it wrong. If managers are incentivized strictly by fee dollars, then I think you run the risk of managing not in the public interest. I don’t think it is impossible for a for-profit LLC to set up the right kind of incentive structure for its managers so that they manage in the public interest. I think it’s a little more difficult, but I don’t think it’s impossible.
My leaning is toward the not-for-profit model, because I think it’s a little easier for a not-for-profit organization to really keep top priority on the public interest, as opposed to the corporate interest.
Besides the financial challenge Los Alamos represents to a prospective manager, the site is full of environmental and occupational risks and hazards that DOE wants the next contractor to mitigate by changing the workplace culture at the lab. None of this seems easy to do, especially for an entity with little or no prior history at Los Alamos. Why risk your reputation by getting involved at all?
Really, the answer to why goes back to what I was saying about the public service thing. The answer is, there’s a need there. Yes, it’s risky. You risk your reputation, you risk not being able to make the kind of changes that are needed. But it goes back to the culture of Texas A&M University. If there’s a chance that you can make a positive difference for the public good, then you’re duty-bound to try.
