New leadership is wrapping up its first week on the job at the Sandia National Laboratories, following a transition that removed former contractor Lockheed Martin from its management position.
The National Nuclear Security Administration last December awarded the management and operations contract to National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, a subsidiary of Honeywell International. The deal is worth $2.6 billion per year over a decade, with all options.
Sandia Corp. had previously managed the lab since 1949, since 1993 as a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, which in 2015 paid $4.7 million to settle a claim that it illegally used federal funding to lobby for a contract extension. Lockheed, one of the bidders for the new contract, chose not to protest the award once it was announced.
National lab veteran Stephen Younger is the new director for the multi-mission, multi-location operation. He replaces Jill Hruby, a longtime Sandia manager who became director in 2015.
Younger said at a news conference on his first day on the job that he expects the lab to maintain its national security and basic science missions, but that “we are in what I call a strategic time, a rapidly changing time. Sandia will maintain its flexibility in responding to that somewhat uncertain future.”
David Douglass is serving as the lab’s deputy director.
Sandia has roughly 10,000 employees across its locations in New Mexico, California, Hawaii, and Nevada. The labs conduct non-nuclear engineering development for nuclear weapons, develop systems to ensure the reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and support the manufacturing and disassembly of nuclear weapons, along with other nonproliferation and treaty verification support activities.
BWX Technologies subsidiary Nuclear Fuel Services has received roughly $141.7 million in first-quarter contract options from the U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program for nuclear submarine and aircraft carrier fuel production, development, and decommissioning operations, the company announced last week.
BWXT said it has already begun this contract work, with the majority scheduled for completion throughout the rest of this year. Nuclear Fuel Services manufactures naval nuclear fuel for U.S. nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, having served as the sole provider of the material for decades.
The company announced in April 2016 that the naval nuclear propulsion program awarded contracts to two of its subsidiaries – Nuclear Fuel Services and the Nuclear Operations Group – worth roughly $3.1 billion, with options. It said at the time it had received $1.2 billion of the award in 2016 and would receive the rest this year and next.
BWXT also said last year that the National Nuclear Security Administration had awarded Nuclear Fuel Services a $241.5 million contract to downblend 10.4 metric tons of highly enriched uranium for use as commercial nuclear reactor fuel. The work under this contract is expected to continue through early 2019.
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