As the National Nuclear Security Administration considers how to move forward on its next big procurement, it’s considering more than just one of its biggest nuclear weapons laboratories, acting NNSA Administrator Neile Miller said yesterday at the fifth annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. Even though the agency’s Y-12/Pantex procurement still isn’t over, industry officials have turned their attention to Sandia National Laboratories, where Lockheed Martin’s contract to run the lab expires in September. Miller declined to release details about its Sandia recompete plans, but said the agency was considering Sandia as part of a broader strategy. “We’re trying to get away from individual one-offs,” Miller said, adding: “We’re spending a lot of time trying to understand where do the various procurements need to go to make that whole enterprise look like what we want it to look like going forward. We see them as pieces of a whole rather than as individuals. So with regard to that, I would say we’re doing a lot of that thinking right now, and I would expect that, you know, in due course we’ll have things to announce.”
Since announcing that it would recompete the Sandia contract, the NNSA sought industry input about combining full or partial management of the lab with the Kansas City Plant. National Security Technologies’ contract to run the Nevada National Security Site also expires before the end of the decade. “We got a lot of interesting responses, most of which, I would think virtually all of which, although I can’t swear to that, said we ought to consider more than Sandia,” Miller told NW&M Monitor on the sidelines of the summit. “Not that we’re doing everything people tell us to do but it’s an obvious thing to think about.” While Miller said no decisions have been made, she did offer a hint about the direction the NNSA was heading on the Sandia procurement. “I would expect that it’s going to look different from what we’ve done in the past,” she said.