Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
4/18/2014
With about two months left before proposals are due for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science Brookhaven National Laboratory procurement, no clear-cut competitor to incumbent Brookhaven Science Associates has emerged and industry officials are questioning whether that will happen at all. Brookhaven is the first Office of Science contract competed since a competition for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory drew only one bid in 2009, and while a handful of companies have shown interest in challenging BSA—a partnership of Battelle and Stony Brook University—industry officials are growing increasingly skeptical that a challenge will come. “You hear lots of rumors but nothing is forming up hard that I’ve seen,” one industry official told NS&D Monitor.
While nearly a dozen companies showed up for an industry day for the procurement in January, several companies in particular have shown particular interest, according to industry officials. Universities Research Association, which manages Fermilab for DOE, has been actively seeking an industry partner, and URA has been linked at times with URS, which would provide an operations complement to the scientific focus URA would bring to the table. Southeastern Universities Research Association also is believed to have interest in the contract, though industry officials do not believe they’ve found a partner. Fluor, Honeywell, CB&I and IBM all have previously shown interest in running the laboratory but are no longer believed to be making a serious play for the contract. “It takes a lot of things,” another industry official told NS&D Monitor. “It takes a team. It takes money and it takes a lab director. You’ve got to put all those pieces together.” Even though a pre-proposal conference was held this week, the official cautioned that there was still time for a competing team to form because proposals aren’t due until June 19.
BSA Still Vulnerable?
When DOE made the decision to compete the Brookhaven contract, incumbent Brookhaven Science Associates appeared vulnerable. In Fiscal Year 2012, it received its first “C-” on its annual evaluation from DOE, in environment, safety and health, and last summer DOE finalized a $959,595 fee reduction for Brookhaven Science Associates because of an accident that occurred in 2011 during decommissioning activities at the lab’s Graphite Research Reactor. When it announced that it planned to compete the lab contract in 2012, DOE said that it hoped the competition would “result in improved contractor performance and cost efficiencies at BNL.” At the time, the decision to compete the contract stood in stark contrast to recent extensions handed out at Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. “You’ve got to believe they want change, or else they’ve been extending all of these Science labs,” one industry official said.
BSA, however, took a proactive approach to addressing its management issues, bringing in Doon Gibbs as the lab’s director last year and shoring up operations by hiring former Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Fermilab official Jack Anderson as Deputy Director for Operations. In Fiscal Year 2013, it improved its performance, receiving two “A-s” and six “B+s” on its annual review. “They took the strategy of not waiting for the competition,” another industry official said. “You get your team in place beforehand so you can argue not only are they a whiz-bang team but they work together to good effect.”
Is Science Getting What it Wants?
That approach may have scared off other competitors, the industry official suggested, but in the end, the Office of Science may have gotten the change it wanted. “It may have charged BSA up to put a proposal together,” the official said. “I think in the Office of Science if you had candid conversations with some of the long-term people they would tell you they’d be happy to not get much competition but they did get improvement. People had to put a proposal in not knowing whether there was someone else out there. That may be what’s happened.”
DOE also didn’t do much to generate interest, using the same Office of Science template for lab procurements that it used for Fermilab and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Both lab competitions were won by incumbents that were the only bidders. One of the only major differences is that up to 15 award-term extensions are available in the contract. The fee for the contract is capped at $7.3 million a year for for-profit companies and $6.9 million a year for non-profit entities.
