It was a packed house at the Los Alamos National Laboratory this week, when the Energy Department hosted would-be bidders on a new, decade-spanning contract to manage and operate the nuclear weapons facility.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which is managing the forthcoming procurement for DOE, did not release an official headcount or attendees list for Tuesday’s site visit and subsequent one-on-one meetings. However, one source said higher-than-expected attendance prompted the to host an extra day of one-on-one meetings, on Thursday, between agency officials and potential lab managers.
“All potential offerors that responded within the required timeline were authorized to attend the site visit and scheduled one-on-ones,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in a Thursday email.
The semiautonomous NNSA in July released a draft solicitation for the next Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) management and operations contract. Prospective bidders were invited to tour the lab this week and ask questions of NNSA officials ahead of a final solicitation expected in September. The agency plans to evaluate all bids by December, with an award to follow early next year.
Incumbent Los Alamos National Security’s (LANS) contract is set to expire Sept. 30, 2018. LANS is a consortium led by University of California with industry partners Bechtel National, BWX Technologies, and AECOM.
The University of California has indicated it will “likely” bid on the follow-on pact, but did not respond this week to a query regarding its participation at the contractor event.
Of the corporate incumbents, only BWX Technologies would confirm it attended the meeting. Bechtel, senior corporate partner in LANS, declined to comment about this week’s site visit, citing company policy against discussing ongoing procurements. A spokesman for junior partner LANS partner AECOM did not reply to a request for comment this week.
Meanwhile, the University of Texas, which contemplates leading a bid for the next LANL management contract, confirmed that it brought out the big guns for this week’s site visit.
“David Daniel, University of Texas System deputy chancellor, and a small group of University representatives, were at Los Alamos this week,” a University of Texas spokesperson told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor Thursday.
Daniel has been the point-man on the recently disclosed University of Texas bid effort. Last week, he told the system’s board of regents that the university intended to lead a team comprising industry and possibly university partners in an attempt to unseat the incumbent University of California.
Meanwhile, Los Alamos locals remain skittish about the draft bid the NNSA released earlier in the summer. The head of a regional interest group told NS&D Monitor that her organization was turned away from the site visit, but was allowed to invite potential offerors to an off-site meeting with local industry and government officials.
Other than dropping invitations off in the room where the site visit was held, “there’s no process right now for communities to engage” in the NNSA’s acquisition program, Andrea Romero, executive Director of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities, said in a Thursday telephone interview.
Romero said an official with the University of Texas on Tuesday met with some 35 assembled members of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities.
Local Los Alamos government officials raised concerns about the NNSA’s procurement soon after the agency dropped the draft solicitation for the next laboratory management pact. Among other things, county officials worried that a proposed cap on fees — the draft RFP says the proposed fixed fee for lab management cannot exceed 1 percent of the estimated cost, and the proposed award fee cannot exceed 0.5 percent of the cost for each contract period — would scare away qualified for-profit entities.
Romero said Thursday that her group is also concerned about a potential award to a nonprofit entity, which would have a lesser tax burden than a for-profit management team.
“The economics of the region sort of revolve around Los Alamos National Laboratory,” Romero told NS&D Monitor.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory employees roughly 11,200 people on a 40-square-mile campus north of Santa Fe, with a roughly $2.5 billion annual budget. Its mission focuses on national security, but covers research on everything from the climate to nanotechnology. It would remain the primary production facility for plutonium pits, the cores of nuclear weapons, under the ongoing U.S. nuclear modernization program.
The lab management contract going out to bid would run for 10 years, including a five-year option period.
