The head of the management and operations contractor for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada National Security Site said this week he expects a seamless transition to a new M&O contract – an award for which is soon to be announced.
James Holt, president of National Security Technologies (NSTec), the contractor that has run the site for the last 10 years, said in an interview with Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor that his focus is on strong performance for the remainder of the existing contract, which expires on Sept. 30.
The NNSA issued a final request for proposals for the site’s M&O contract last November, with responses due in December. NSTec is comprised of contractors Northrop Grumman, AECOM, CH2M, and BWX Technologies. Holt did not specify whether some variation of the current NSTec team has submitted a bid for the follow-on contract.
“Quite frankly my job is to finish this contract, so I am very focused on making sure we have good performance [in] everything we do – everything safely, securely, right to the end of the contract,” Holt said. “And whoever wins this, we’re going to seamlessly transition it to whoever it is.”
The Nevada National Security Site – for decades used for nuclear test blasts as the Nevada Test Site – today hosts the NNSA’s high-hazard operations, with a mission that involves nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship, defense experimentation, testing of weapons of mass destruction detection technologies, arms control verification testing, and homeland security.
Holt was named president of NSTec earlier this year, having previously served as the company’s vice president for operations, vice president for program integration, and director of defense experimentation and stockpile stewardship. He celebrates his 10-year anniversary with the contractor next week.
In the Q&A, Holt discussed challenges and improvements at the site, including the 2014 explosion of a drum containing isopropyl alcohol at the site’s Nonproliferation Test and Evaluation Complex that injured two workers. A 2015 chemical waste drum fire a year later further called attention to safety culture and hazardous chemical storage issues at the site.
Holt also discussed advances in subcritical experiments and stockpile stewardship, the upcoming NNSS contract award, and the future of nuclear testing. The interview that follows has been edited for clarity and length.
Have you experienced any unexpected challenges during your time as president? Has anything surprised you about the work?
There are always surprises, and always things that come up. But the work we do here, I understood well before I came, and I really enjoy what we do here. We do a great deal for national security across the board, and that’s very good. We’ve had our challenges as we’ve gone through – a couple years ago we had some issues that came up but we worked through those and out of that we’ve come through a period and become stronger, both as a company and how we focus on mission, and how we do our operations in particular. We focus a lot on operational excellence. We’ve put in place some pillars that have helped us really focus ourselves to take care of the issues and we’ve had very good performance since that time.
You’re referring to the five pillars of excellence concept?
Yes, the five pillars we put in place [include] the focus that we have on communication with our employees, the safety and quality side, a focus on how we integrate our programs and projects with our operations. It’s really important that we make sure that that integration works across both sides, so as we execute our work – whether it’s experiments, whatever it happens to be – that we have to make sure that we’re doing that safely and the operations side is really what supports that.
Our fourth pillar has to do with our work management, our planning, and our control, and that’s something that we really worked on to improve efficiency but to also make sure that we have everything in place, [like] our work packages that . . . have all the information there for our workers so that they understand exactly how to execute their work. And the fifth one is on issues management and continuous improvement process, which is always a struggle, [and] we’re always trying to improve on our issues management. There are always issues that come up and we work through those as we go, and we focus to make sure that we’re looking at the most important and putting it in the right priority. And we’ve developed a really strong risk management program that’s helped us go through all of our pillars to look at: where do we need to focus first, and what are the most important things on the table, so those portions have helped us really improve our performance.
You mentioned that NSTec faced a few problems in the past. Could you elaborate on those?
We actually had a problem at one of our facilities where we had some chemicals stored and we were not focused enough on those and we saw one barrel of chemicals actually explode in 2014. We completely developed within the pillar system a new chemical management program that’s allowed us to completely revamp how we do everything from our ordering, our procurement side, to how we bring them into our warehouse, where we store them, how we store them, how we use them, and how we disposition them. The problem was one of our customers had brought in chemicals [and] we’d allowed them to be literally stored beyond their appropriate life, and therefore we learned a big lesson that we really have to be sure that each step, including the disposition of whatever happens to be left after we’ve done our work, that we disposition that appropriately.
NSTec was given an overall positive review in NNSA’s latest performance evaluation for fiscal 2015 [receiving 88 percent of its award, the third-highest evaluation in the NNSA complex]. What do you attribute this to, and what do you think you should focus on in terms of improvements prior to the next review?
The five pillars that we just talked about are really what we’re focusing on, and if you look at how particularly we integrate our programs and operations, how we’re looking at every element, the safety that now goes into all of our work packages, all of those things combined, every part of that is an important aspect of good performance. So, quite frankly, in 2015 we had a very good year. We really performed well, and I really attribute it to the fact that we refocused ourselves after 2014, put the pillars in place, and we’ve really worked very hard to make sure that every aspect of the company is following our processes and all of our procedures.
Is there anything in particular you’re doing to increase retention of technical talent, considering the concern across the enterprise in being able to attract and retain that talent?
It is very, very difficult right now – it seems like there are not enough good particularly technical people, but when you really look at a company across the board, there’s more than just your scientists and your engineers and your technicians. You have to have everyone in place to make everything work and it is always a challenge, there is no doubt. Our attrition rate is pretty low, but even so, we still have a lot of openings and we are always looking for good people, as every site in the complex is, and even . . . in the commercial side as well.
But what we are trying to do as we bring new people in [is to] get them incorporated into the company, allow them to see more areas inside NSTec, so that we can make sure that if they are in an area and they want to try something new, then we always give them opportunities to actually move around within NSTec. We’ve got some new initiatives where we take new employees out, we make sure that they tour all of the work that we’re doing across the company, so that they get a chance to see that. It begins to get them more involved, [and] we tell them a lot about the history – we have a lot of history here – but we also focus on what we’re doing today and our national security missions. So all of those things are to try to retain the workforce, trying to put as many things in place, supporting the employees as we can.
When it comes to recruiting, we’re out there at universities. We’re very well connected with [the University of Nevada, Las Vegas], and University of Nevada, Reno. We go outside the state and spend a lot of time at other universities recruiting, but it’s just difficult – a lot of competition out there. We do as well as we can do, [and] we’re always challenged by how long it takes to get clearances and to get people fully involved in the work, but we have to work through those things.
How has the M&O job and the site’s mission changed during NSTec’s tenure? Do you anticipate any changes in the focus of that work in the near future?
We’re always broadening and I have seen some changes over the 10 years in some of the make-up of the work itself. There’s a lot more work here that’s very focused on some of the things that are occurring in the world, where you’re worried about what’s going on with the warfighters in different parts of the world, and we see some of that work coming in. We also see a real interest at adding capabilities to our stockpile stewardship program, where we do subcritical experiments. We’re in the process of putting an enhanced capability for our subcritical program in place, which will literally change the type and the amount of work that we do [in the program]. So those things have changed, they are evolving.
The uniqueness of the NNSS allows some work that really can’t go on anywhere else because of the isolation, because of where we are, and because of the history of the site. All of those things come together to provide a unique place to be able to do work that’s very difficult to do anywhere else. So all of those things . . . have become enhancements for the NNSS, and we’ve seen the work change some, [but] it hasn’t changed tremendously. We’re hoping to see new programs – we’re working with NASA on some work for deep space technologies . . . but we’re still doing what’s important, what’s our top priority – the stockpile stewardship program. [We’re also doing] a lot of the work-for-others . . . with the DoD, with Homeland Security, a lot of different government agencies.
Can you elaborate on the changes to the subcritical program that you mentioned?
Reporter’s note: subcritical experiments, physics experiments that provide technical information in support of the NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program, are conducted at the site’s underground U1a Complex to examine the behavior of plutonium shocked by forces produced by chemical high explosives.
We’ve been doing subcritical programs in our U1a underground laboratory facility since 1996, and we have been . . . improving our capabilities over time. But a few years ago we were able to, with the laboratories, develop some diagnostics that we had never been able to develop before. Optical diagnostics have allowed us to acquire data that 10 years ago we never imagined we could even do. All of that is based on fiber optic technology that’s improved in the communications world, but we’re now using all of that in our experimental work.
And now we’re beginning to see that we want to take the next step forward [with] what we call [the] radiographic machine, which is an X-ray machine, but one that’s much more capable than we have today, that allows us to take images during our experiment. That’s one element of the enhanced capability. We’re also looking at new types of diagnostics that we could use in our subcritical experiments, but to do that it’s going to force us to change the infrastructure in our U1a facility – we’re talking about increasing the space, being able to put new capabilities in, and all of these really support the entire capability to certify the weapons in the national stockpile. So this is an element of what goes into that certification process.
On the upcoming NNSS contract award – are you willing at all to talk about whether NSTec bid on the contract, and if so, why NSTec should keep the contract?
Quite frankly my job is to finish this contract, so I am very focused on making sure we have good performance [in] everything we do – everything safely, securely, right to the end of the contract. And whoever wins this, we’re going to seamlessly transition it to whoever it is. I would love to see the follow-on to NSTec win this, but quite frankly, my job is to finish this contract, and that’s what I’m focused on. As we go through this, that’s where we’ll be. Whatever the decision is – I expect a decision pretty soon, or an announcement on the decision – it really doesn’t matter. The whole point here is the site, and that’s what’s important – the mission that we conduct. We will transition over a few months, whatever that time period turns out to be when we actually see the announcement, and we’ll transition into whoever wins.
Do you have any thoughts on the new procurement approach that NNSA has taken in the National Security Campus and NNSS requests for proposals so far, with a shifted emphasis on past performance rather than the former emphasis on the science and technology evaluation criterion?
I really don’t. This was their decision on how to do this. I think it’s a much simpler process, so we’ll see how it all turns out. All of the teams had the opportunity to write their proposals, and we were basically all doing the same process, so however it turns out, however they decide to make their decision, we’ll follow through on that. We’ve seen a lot of different, I’ll call it, acquisition and contracting processes over many years and decades. We’ll see how this one works out. Right now we’re just waiting for a decision.
You were recently appointed to the Board of Directors of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance. Could you tell me about what it does, the role you play on the board, and how that’s related to NNSS?
This is a good thing that I believe is really important for us as a company – [for] more than 2,000 employees to be part of the community, to help support the economic growth here in Las Vegas and southern Nevada. I’m very pleased to support the economic alliance and everything we can do as a company to help southern Nevada. That’s basically the reason I was very interested in doing this. I expect that as the next contract comes in, whoever wins, my job is to make sure that they’ve got this path forward as well, so I thought it was a very nice thing to get this opportunity to do this, but I’m very excited about participating and being part of – how do we really help broaden the economic base? Here in southern Nevada it’s very, very focused on the gaming industry, and we really are looking at how we can help broaden it. We are literally the largest high-tech company – scientists and engineers – in the state of Nevada. We are looking at how can we help broaden that so we can bring more of that type of industry into Nevada itself.
On a much bigger scale, considering the Nevada site’s legacy, what is the future of nuclear testing? What are your thoughts on how reliable it is to maintain the U.S. moratorium on full-scale testing, especially with the concern now that veterans of the complex are aging out? How do you maintain those same capabilities?
It’s very interesting because I have a history that goes back to underground testing. I actually was a principle investigator for two underground tests in the 1980s first, and then in 1990, so I have a lot of history in the underground test program. We talked about our subcritical program – our capabilities today to acquire data [are] very different than what we had when we were doing full-scale nuclear testing. We are gathering more detailed information to understand better the physics and the materials aspects than we ever have. From that perspective, I can’t imagine that we would ever be required to go back to nuclear testing because of technical reasons.
We have such an improvement in our ability to gather data – what the laboratories are doing on the computational side, with the models they put together and their ability on the computational side. We really have enhanced that capability a great deal and I just don’t see the technical need to go back to nuclear testing in the future. With the stockpile stewardship program, it’s been a tremendous success, we have been able to maintain our confidence that the weapons in the stockpile will perform as required. They’re safe, they’re secure, and that they can literally perform if required, and so all of those things from that perspective drive me to the point that says we’re not going to need to go back to testing.
