Livermore lab's future is in limbo

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Oct 28, 2006 | by Ian Hoffman

As federal contractors delivered boxes of proposals this week to the U.S. Energy Department, the competition to run Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory looked like it might answer a larger question:

Will Livermore remain a full-fledged nuclear weapons laboratory or reinvent itself as something else?

Short of closing down the lab, three teams bidding for management of the $1.7 billion-a-year lab hardly could be farther apart in imagining a new future for its 8,000 workers and battery of scientific tools that includes the world's most powerful laser and two fastest supercomputers.

On Friday, the deadline set by the National Nuclear Security Administration to submit bids, the two top contenders -- a team led by the University of California and Bechtel National and another led by defense contractor Northrop Grumman -- were saying next to nothing about their plans. The third team, GREEN LLC, is made up of activists who want to get out of weapons research entirely.

But it's clear that the lab run solely by the university for more than 50 years soon will face a pinch of higher operating costs and the likelihood of losing bread-and-butter weapons work with plutonium and possibly high explosives.

The federal government plans to move weapons plutonium and uranium out of the Livermore Valley by 2014 for security reasons, and weapons officials also have talked of shutting down Site 300, the lab's remote testing area for high explosives. The moves are part of a broader shrinkage and upgrade in the Cold War-era nuclear weapons complex.

The UC/Bechtel team is likely to promote itself as the improved status quo manager, more experienced and better able to orchestrate the new division of weapons work between Livermore and Los Alamos, its sister lab in New Mexico, also run by the UC/Bechtel team.

The team also will sell its experience in homeland security, conventional defense research and basic science, all areas of specialty for Battelle Memorial Institute and the university. The team's proposed director is George Miller, a weapons designer whose imprint is on more than a half-dozen U.S. nuclear bombs and warheads.

Northrop Grumman is expected to pitch itself as a game changer.

If as federal weapons officials suggest in their new Complex 2030 plan, the government wants a leaner, meaner, more secure nuclear weapons complex, Northrop Grumman intends to deliver it.

"It's a matter of how you embrace that, what you can do for the customer," said Northrop Grumman spokesman David Apt. "It's interpreting that vision and how you can bring it to fruition."

Northrop executives tried teaming up with lots of universities, including some in California, Nevada and Colorado. But none stepped up to run a bomb lab, and Northrop is proposing to run Lawrence Livermore more or less with the team that it has running the Nevada Test Site.

Other partners include AECOM, a government services and environmental management contractor; Nuclear Fuel Services and CH2M Hill, both expert firms in handling highly hazardous materials such as plutonium; and the security firm Wackenhut Services.

The president of that team is Stephen Younger, a physicist who cut his teeth as a Livermore weapons designer before a falling out with senior managers sent him to Los Alamos, where he led the weapons program in the late 1990s.

Northrop's Apt declined to confirm widespread speculation that Younger will lead the Livermore bid.

That team beat most of the contractors on the UC/Bechtel team to win management of the test site earlier this year. The desert test site for decades has been the proving range for the weapons labs, their bombs, nuclear rocket engines and wilder, classified experiments.

Now houses are crowding around once-remote weapons labs and factories in California, New Mexico and elsewhere, and the sandy expanses beyond Mercury, Nev., are being eyed as the last safe, secure place for hands-on weapons research.

As for exactly what Livermore would do, Northrop isn't saying, but the suggestion is something rather different than what the lab does today.

"We'll see what the willingness is," Apt said. "We think there's a great opportunity here for the future of the facility and the joint venture."

GREEN LLC, a collection of disarmament activists and renewable- energy enthusiasts, would get Livermore entirely out of the weapons business and steer the lab into unclassified, civilian research in renewable energy and climate change. The team also put in a bid to manage Los Alamos lab but its bid was rejected as technically insufficient.

"We don't expect the Department of Energy's going to choose our bid, but it's a good bid," said Marylia Kelley, head of a Livermore- based lab watchdog group, Tri-Valley CAREs. "It's technically feasible and morally correct. It would put Lawrence Livermore lab in the forefront of developing new energy technologies and be a world- class center for civilian science."

Rather than use Livermore's giant 192-beam laser for weapons research, the team would open it up to astrophysicists, materials scientists and planetary scientists.