The University of Texas’ Board of Regents on Thursday deferred official approval of the institution’s planned bid to run the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory by more than two weeks, to Nov. 27.
The board was scheduled to take action on the proposal Thursday — the Austin-based system in August approved $4.5 million in bid preparations — but pushed off any definitive move at the last minute.
During Thursday’s webcast meeting, Sara Martinez Tucker, chair of the UT Board of Regents, said action on the bid was “deferred to our Nov. 27 board meeting.” That is exactly two weeks before proposal are due to run the New Mexico facility: the oldest U.S. nuclear-weapons lab, and the only one with a more-or-less certain role in production of new plutonium pits for the 30-year, $1.2 trillion U.S. nuclear arms-modernization effort now underway.
Tucker gave no reason for delaying UT’s approval of its proposed bid, and a university spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment Friday.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration released its final solicitation for the next Los Alamos National Laboratory management and operations contract on Oct. 18.
The contract includes a five-year base and five one-year options. The lab-management portion of the pact calls for more than $20 billion in work — including about $10 billion in the base period — and the winning bidder could get up to $50 million in annual fees for its lab-management work.
Los Alamos National Security, a partnership led by the University of California and Bechtel National, manages the lab now under a roughly $2-billion-a-year contract awarded in 2006. The Department of Energy decided to recompete the pact after a series of safety problems, including a shoddily packaged nuclear-waste drum from Los Alamos that caused an underground radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., in 2014.
The University of California is set to officially approve its bid for the follow-on Los Alamos management contract Nov. 15 during a meeting of the institution’s Board of Regents. The institution had been the lab’s sole manager for decades prior to joining Los Alamos National Security.
Texas A&M University is also in the hunt for the contract, though it is not clear in which capacity the Lone Star State’s other big public university system might bid.
The corporate partners on the incumbent, AECOM, Bechtel National, and BWX Technologies, have not yet confirmed they will seek a role on the next Los Alamos contract. Bechtel and BWX Technologies attended one-on-one meetings with the Department of Energy at Los Alamos before the agency released the final solicitation. BWXT even confirmed it was evaluating the proposal: something Bechtel and AECOM would not do.
Honeywell, which has strung together a series of contract wins on the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons complex lately, has said it will not seek a role at Los Alamos.
Bids are due Dec. 11.
