The University of Texas’ (UT) Board of Regents on Monday narrowly approved a bid on a potentially decade-long contract to manage the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The board voted 4-3 in favor of the motion, which will pair the university with at least one corporate partner as part of a limited liability corporation, regents said during a webcast meeting Monday evening.
“The team we’ve assembled is one that will be able to identify and mitigate a lot of the risks there,” Regent Paul Foster said ahead of the vote.
If UT wins its bid, it will nab a contract worth $20 billion or more over a decade to manage the Department of Energy’s (DOE) oldest weapons lab. Annual fees under the contract could be as high as $50 million. The Energy Department plans to produce new plutonium pits at a plant to be built at the New Mexico facility during the span of the contract UT is now officially pursuing.
Bids are due Dec. 11, with an award expected in April or May.
Voting for the bid were regents Ernest Aliseda, David Beck, Paul Foster, and Jeffery Hildebrand. Voting against the motion were regents Kevin Eltife, Steven Hicks, and Janiece Longoria.
Regents Sara Tucker and James “Rad” Weaver did not vote.
Longoria spoke most forcefully against a bid.
“I really believe this is outside our mission and our core capability,” she said during the meeting. “UT administration is really driving this, not UT Austin.”
Moreover, Longoria said, UT has “no experience running a nuclear laboratory, and no experience handling weapon-grade plutonium.” Longoria worried that “it is also possible that our costs could exceed the reimbursement and the fees that would be received.”
This will be the university’s second attempt to be part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s management team. In 2005, the last time the contract was out for bids, UT was part of a team led by Lockheed Martin. That team ultimately lost out to Los Alamos National Security, the current incumbent.
The University of Texas also chased the latest management and operations contract for the Sandia National Laboratories, which DOE in December awarded to Honeywell subsidiary National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia. In that competition, UT was part of a team led by Battelle and Boeing that also included the University of New Mexico and Texas A&M University System.
During the performance period for the next Los Alamos management contract, the lab will become the plutonium pit factory for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The next lab manager will both build new pit-production facilities and resume production of the fissile nuclear-weapon cores.
Los Alamos National Security is a partnership led by the University of California and senior industry partner Bechtel National. AECOM and BWX Technologies are also part of the current prime, whose contract is set to expire on Sept. 30, 2018.
Teaming arrangements for the follow-on competition are unknown so far, but a source said this week that AECOM is not competing for the next Los Alamos management contract. As for the rest of the incumbents’ partners, BWX Technologies has acknowledged it is interested in the follow-on contract, while Bechtel National has declined to comment.
The University of California, which spent decades as the lab’s sole manager, has broken away from its Los Alamos National Security partners to lead a new bid.
In November — in stark contrast to their University of Texas counterparts — 17 of the University of California’s 18 appointed regents officially approved a long-expected bid on the next Los Alamos contract. The only University of California regent who did not vote yes on the bid did not participate in the vote.
DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, the branch of the agency responsible for nuclear weapons, decided in 2014 not to renew Los Alamos National Security’s contract after a poorly packaged barrel of nuclear waste from Los Alamos leaked radiation into DOE’s underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.