The University of California will seek new industry partners to chase a follow-on operations contract the Department of Energy expects to award next year for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a university regent suggested Thursday.
“As we go forward … we’re going to be bidding with a different group of private sector partners,” University of California Regent Norman Pattiz said in San Diego during a meeting of the Board of Regents’ National Laboratories Subcommittee. Pattiz chairs the subcommittee.
The University of California is the lead partner in Los Alamos National Security (LANS), which in 2006 won a contract worth roughly $2 billion a year to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). LANS includes senior industry partner Bechtel as well as AECOM and BWX Technologies. All three companies are also partners on the university-led Lawrence Livermore National Security partnership that manages DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The follow-on to LANS’ contract is not out for bid yet, so the university is technically not pursuing an award. However, university President Janet Napolitano has said she anticipates requesting permission from the Board of Regents to submit a bid, once DOE formally issues its solitication.
Since LANS took the reins at LANL in 2006, there have been several high-profile nuclear safety lapses at Los Alamos. In 2013, LANL’s Plutonium Facility was shut down after a nuclear criticality scare involving plutonium rods. In 2014, a barrel of nuclear waste improperly packaged by lab subcontractor EnergySolutions was blamed for a radiation leak at an underground disposal facility south of LANL. This year, an employee air-mailed plutonium from the lab that by law may be shipped only over-the-road.
After the radiation leak — which shut down the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for almost three years and slowed Cold War nuclear cleanup across the country —DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration had seen enough. The semi-autonomous nuclear stockpile steward announced it would allow Los Alamos National Security’s contract to expire on Sept. 30, 2018.
“They’re very dissatisfied,” Kim Budil, the University of California’s vice president for national laboratories, said of DOE during Thursday’s regents meeting.
Pattiz said Thursday that “most of those, the problems that we have found, have usually been within areas that are supervised by our private sector partners.”
After the regents meeting, representatives from the university and Bechtel moved to smooth over any perceived acrimony between them that might have arisen from Pattiz’s comments.
“We have greatly appreciated the opportunity to work with our industrial partners in the Los Alamos National Security, LLC team over the past twelve years,” Chris Harrington, a University of California spokesperson, wrote in an email Friday. “While there have been issues at the Lab, this team has worked together to make many improvements to the operations at LANL.”
Harrington also noted that the the university and Bechtel “continue to very effectively operate Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory” for the National Nuclear Security Administration, under a contract held by the Lawrence Livermore National Security partnership.
“Every day our teams at Los Alamos and Livermore, made up of dedicated colleagues from all the LLC partners, work in support of national interests and defense,” Bechtel spokesman Fred deSousa wrote in an email Friday. “They deserve our support and our gratitude for their service in a very challenging environment. Let’s not distract from that mission.”
Neither Kim nor Pattiz identified any prospective industry partners for the university’s next bid to run LANL. According to a draft solicitation DOE released in July, the upcoming management pact will be for 10 years, including a five-year base and a single five-year option period.
None of the industry partners on Los Alamos National Security besides Bechtel would comment for this story. AECOM was not a founding partner in the consortium; it came on-board after purchasing URS. A few other major defense contractors with a current or past presence on the DOE weapons complex likewise declined to comment on their interest in bidding for the next LANL management contract, including: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.
Besides the University of California, the University of Texas plans to lead a bid for the next LANL management contract. The university partnered with Lockheed Martin in an unsuccessful bid for the current contract. The University of New Mexico is also in the hunt, though it has not confirmed whether it will lead its own bid or join someone else’s.
The University of California had managed LANL for more than 70 years before partnering with industry to create Los Alamos National Security. Safety and management concerns at LANL in the early 2000s, coupled with a drive to privatize lab operations, prompted DOE to seek a new management partner in 2005. Joining with industry helped University of California keep much of its work at the lab.
