Purdue University on April 6 confirmed it teamed with Bechtel National, of Reston, Va., on a bid to run the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico — a teaming arrangement first reported by Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor in February.
The confirmation came Friday from Mitch Daniels, president of the Indiana-based university. Daniels spoke to the local Lafayette Journal and Courier newspaper on the sidelines of a meeting of the institution’s board of trustees.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) expects to award a new Los Alamos Management and Operations contract this month or next. The agency hosted would-be bidders for one-on-one meetings in Washington the week of March 19. Bidding on the pact — the lab management portion of which is valued at more than $20 billion over 10 years, with options — closed Dec. 11. The winning team could earn $50 million in annual lab-management fees.
Bechtel is the lead industry partner on incumbent lab manager Los Alamos National Security, which is losing its contract after a series of nuclear safety lapses. The current management pact expires Sept. 30.
Los Alamos National Security also includes the University of California — which ran Los Alamos solo for most of the lab’s 70-plus-year history — plus industry teammates AECOM and BWX Technologies.
The University of California has confirmed it bid on the follow-on contract, as has the University of Texas. Neither institution has identified its teammates. Texas A&M University has also said it wants a role on the next lab-management team, as has BWX Technologies. AECOM is not bidding, according to a source.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory is the oldest active nuclear weapons lab in the Department of Energy complex. Its annual budget has been $250 million for the past several years, but would increase to nearly $330 million if Congress approves the White House’s fiscal 2019 budget request. Los Alamos does design work for nuclear warheads and is preparing to produce fissile plutonium pits cores for those weapons by the middle of the next decade.
The NNSA used to handle Los Alamos’ legacy nuclear-waste-cleanup mission, but that responsibility passed to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management after a barrel of transuranic waste improperly packaged by Los Alamos National Security leaked radiation into the agency’s deep-underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., in 2014. The new Environmental Management contractor, a BWXT-Stoller Newport News Nuclear team, is slated to take over the lab’s cleanup work later this month.
