Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
12/19/2014
A pair of Bechtel and Lockheed Martin executives defended this week the role the private companies play in managing the National Nuclear Security Administration’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, telling a lab effectiveness panel that the corporate reachback brought by the companies that run the labs has made a difference. “If you look at the corporate reachback that’s been brought into the physics labs, we’ve had an impressive cadre of skills,” Bechtel Nuclear Security and Operations General Manager John Howanitz said in a response to a question from former Deputy Energy Secretary T.J. Glauthier, the co-chairman of the Congressionally created Commission to Review the Effectiveness of the National Energy Laboratories.
Teams led by the University of California and Bechtel have run Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories since 2006 and 2007, respectively, and questions have been raised about the value the government has received for the higher fees paid to the contractors. Lockheed Martin’s Sandia Corp. has run Sandia National Laboratories since 1993 for significantly less fee than at Los Alamos and Livermore. Addressing the panel, Lockheed Martin Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Ray Johnson said performance on mission-related work has proven the governance structure at Sandia is working. “On the mission side, cost schedule and performance, measuring the program, how it’s performing is the direct measure of how our corporate expertise is translating,” Johnson said. “You don’t have a before and after, you have an after, but as long as you maintain performance I think that’s value added.”
Is Progress Being Made?
The panel is examining the effectiveness of all of the Department of Energy’s labs, not just the NNSA weapons labs, but it is the weapons labs, especially Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, that have come under scrutiny for the high fees paid. At the commission’s fourth meeting this week, Glauthier asked what corporate expertise and capabilities “really does enter the lab. Does it get translated in? Is it really making a difference? Are we bringing in the project management skills from the corporate world to help improve management of the labs that had a lot of difficulties for many years meeting schedules and budgets?”
While safety and security issues that plagued Los Alamos and Livermore when they were managed exclusively by the University of California were largely curtailed, the labs have still had their share of problems, including Los Alamos’ role in the remediation of transuranic waste drums that have been linked to the radiological release that occurred early this year at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Work has also been largely shut down at Los Alamos’ Plutonium Facility since June of last year due to nuclear criticality safety concerns. “There really is no definitive end, like you celebrate we’ve gotten there, where we’re we need to be,” Howanitz told NS&D Monitor after the meeting. “You’re constantly improving and that’s what we want to do and that’s what we are doing. There are lots of examples of that. We tend to highlight and hear about the bumps in the night and things that go badly but there are a lot of exceptional things happening at the laboratories that we don’t hear about.”
Howanitz said there is a perception that private companies could overhaul the lab’s business systems, but he said that’s not true. “That’s not practical,” he said. “We do everything we can to work with the lab management, the lab director, from a lessons learned perspective, from a brainstorming and idea standpoint, to tweak or add or fill gaps. Is there a better way to do work? And the labs take advantage of that on a regular basis.” He added: “The perception that it’s automatic is not the case. I will add to that the lab’s mission is paramount, and the fact that they’re typically very large, established organizations, wholesale change is not in anyone’s best interest. It really is the fringes.”
