Teams that lost the race to run the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the next 10 years are expecting a formal debriefing from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) next week, after the agency’s decision to entrust the storied weapons lab to a team including longtime manager the University of California.
A pair of sources said the debriefings are on the slate for the week of June 18. After the semiautonomous Energy Department agency explains its choice, teams have 10 days to protest the award with the Government Accountability Office.
The NNSA awarded the next Los Alamos management contract to a team called Triad National Security, consisting of Battelle, the University of California, and Texas A&M University. Fluor Federal Services is among the many junior industry partners on the team. The deal is worth around $20 billion over 10 years, including options. Annual fees were capped at about $50 million.
Of the losing partnerships willing to comment after the NNSA’s award last week, only Bechtel National, which teamed with Purdue University, appeared to leave the door open for a protest.
“We’re disappointed at the government’s decision and believe our team proposed the transformative change the NNSA requested,” a Bechtel spokesperson said. “We will await results of our debrief with the government and evaluate our options.”
In putting the management and operations contract for Los Alamos National Laboratory back on the street, the NNSA was hoping to change the culture at the 75-year-old birthplace of the U.S. atomic weapons program. Safety and managerial gaffes haunted the 12-year tenure of incumbent Los Alamos National Security.
In 2011, as reported this year by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, personnel violated the lab’s criticality safety rules by placing eight plutonium rods closer together than protocol allowed. If pieces of plutonium get too close to one another, they could spark a potentially fatal nuclear chain reaction.
Then, in 2014, Los Alamos National Security allowed a poorly packaged drum of transuranic waste to be shipped to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. The drum burst open in the deep-underground repository, leaking radiation and shutting waste operations down for almost three years.
That was the beginning of the end for Los Alamos National Security, in which the University of California partnered with Bechtel, AECOM, and BWX Technologies. After the accident the NNSA announced it would not pick up options on the incumbent’s contract, and that the agency would strip cleanup of legacy nuclear waste — the sort in the exploding drum — out of the lab’s management and operations contract.
Snafus continued.
In 2017, the lab prime allowed plutonium to be shipped by air when, for safety reasons, it should have shipped by ground. The NNSA docked the contractor $3 million in fees for the mistake.
Shortly after the shipping goof, the NNSA’s call for change at Los Alamos became official. Into the solicitation for the new management contract, the agency inserted a requirement that the next Los Alamos leader deliver “organizational culture change.”
“The contractor shall improve the organizational culture by proactively balancing the conduct of operations in every aspect of executing the statement of work,” the NNSA stated. That meant balancing the lab’s cutting-edge physics research, which helps evaluate the aging nuclear stockpile without nuclear-explosive tests, with its production mission: creating new warhead cores called plutonium pits.
Even before the NNSA baked cultural change into the next Los Alamos management contract, nuclear insiders began to speculate whether any members of the incumbent could credibly present themselves as agents of change.
Nevertheless, it quickly came to light that the two leads on Los Alamos National Security would indeed bid on the follow-on contract.
In total, the NNSA received four responsive bids. The agency has never identified the bidders, other than winner Triad, but other interested parties were:
- Bechtel and Purdue
- The University of Texas and an unidentified corporate partner or partners
- Jacobs and BWX Technologies
Neither the bid proposals nor the agency’s source selection document have been released publicly, so it is not clear how Triad and its competitors proposed to deliver the change the NNSA was looking for.
Triad has not been willing to comment on its bid or its corporate structure, but the company’s address, as printed on the NNSA’s award notice, is Battelle’s corporate headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.
Battelle has some experience managing a national lab in concert with a public university. The company and University of Tennessee already run the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Oak Ridge, Tenn. That lab, however, has not had a defense mission since World War II.
Whatever transpires with the bidders next week, the NNSA will have to move things along quickly if it is to avoid extending Los Alamos National Security again, as it did in 2016. The agency thought it would take about four months to transition the lab over to new management.
Los Alamos National Security’s contract is scheduled to run out Sept. 30: three months and 16 days from deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor on Friday.
