Terry Wallace will become director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory effective Jan. 1, replacing Charles McMillan, the lab announced Tuesday.
Wallace is a stop-gap director who will serve only about nine months at the helm Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) before a new management contractor — and a new director — steps in.
That is expected to happen Sept. 30, when the contract of incumbent LANL prime Los Alamos National Security (LANS) is set to expire.
Meanwhile, Wallace will be responsible for ensuring a smooth transition to the new contractor of the roughly $2.5-billion-a-year Department of Energy nuclear weapons lab. He replaces Charles McMillan, who announced in September he would retire as lab director and president of LANS.
Wallace has been LANL’s principal associate director for global security since 2011. In that role, he “leads Laboratory programs with a focus on applying scientific and engineering capabilities to address national and global security threats, in particular, nuclear threats,” according to his official bio. He has worked at LANL since 2003.
The Department of Energy solicited bids for a follow-on LANL management contract in October. The pact has a five-year base period, five one-year options, and up to $50 million a year in lab-management fees for the winner. Not counting the fees, the lab-management portion of the contract is expected to cost more than $20 billion over 10 years, including about $10 billion in the base period.
DOE in 2014 elected not to extended LANS’ roughly $2-billion-a-year contract after a nuclear waste accident that caused a radiation leak at the agency’s underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. LANS is a partnership led by the University of California and Bechtel National, with industry teammates AECOM and BWX Technologies.
