UPDATED: UC partnership wins contract for Livermore lab

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, May 8, 2007 | by Ian Hoffman

The University of California beat out defense giant Northrop Grumman to remain at the helm of Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab for at least seven more years, albeit in a forced private partnership with corporations and even another university, officials of the U.S. Energy Department said Tuesday in a contract award that surprised almost no one.

The decision on management of the $1.6 billion-a-year lab preserves the university's long monopoly over the design of U.S. nuclear explosives and for the first time hands that research over to a private-sector team, while passing most responsibility for safety, security and other operational headaches of running a national-security lab to San Francisco-based Bechtel National and other industrial partners.

"We think the approach is the right approach," said Tyler Przybylek, senior adviser to the Energy Department's weapons arm. He said the UC/Bechtel-led team offered a "more integrated approach of operations, security, safety, business, joining in to enable better science. More science for the same money, safer, less time wasted on responding to screw-ups. I think that's what we're going to see, and we're willing to put our money and our time where our mouth is."

What the new, private business approach to H-bombs means remains to be seen. An almost identical new management team at Livermore's sister lab, Los Alamos in New Mexico, still is having problems with security and lost weapons secrets while adding a new wrinkle: For the first time in decades, the birthplace of the bomb has closed the doors of its Manhattan Project archives to historians, saying that the private management has "no policy" for accessing its historic records.

The drive for new management of the bomb labs turned serious in 2004, after persistent problems with waste, poor safety and lax security under sole UC management of Los Alamos. The Bush administration and lawmakers in Congress grew fed up and ordered every national lab operated by a single contractor for 50 years or more put up for competitive bid. The measure clearly targeted the University of California and its operation of three labs -- Lawrence Berkeley basic science lab and the nation's two nuclear explosives labs, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.

At the time, the smart money among defense scientists and government contractors said the university would lose at least one of those prestigious labs, probably Los Alamos, the most distant from California and the most troubled. Outside diehard UC partisans, almost no one figured the university would keep running all three labs in any capacity.

Yet that's exactly what happened.

The University of California and its cadre of scientist-managers who according to conventional wisdom couldn't run large projects ended up beating two of the world's biggest defense contractors and their professional acquisitions teams.

The core victory for UC came at Los Alamos against Lockheed Martin, world's largest defense firm and veteran operator of weapons labs in the United States and United Kingdom. Initially, the university spurned 50-50 partnerships first with Lockheed Martin and then with another veteran national lab contractor, Battelle Memorial Institute. But the university eventually was persuaded to drop its insistence on being the dominant player and, with Bechtel, managed to convince federal contracting officials that past management failures losses of classified nuclear weapons information, repeated and serious accidents, plus misspending and equipment thefts -- were largely irrelevant because a new private industry-academic partnership couldn't help but do better.

In the Livermore competition, Northrop Grumman, the nation's third-largest defense firm, pitched a novel consolidation between Livermore lab and the Northrop-operated Nevada Test Site, where the senior executive is a former Livermore weapons designer and former Los Alamos weapons chief named Stephen Younger. But the Northrop team, which also featured environmental and cleanup specialists AECom and CH2M Hill, lacked any academic or basic research component. The UC/Bechtel-led team -- nuclear specialists BWX Technologies and Washington Group, plus Battelle, with expertise in defense and homeland security work, and Texas A&M University -- submitted a slightly lower cost bid and scored higher overall, especially for senior executive management and science and technology.

The UC/Bechtel team also had another leg up: In March, the weapons arm of the Energy Department selected UC scientists at Livermore to design the first of several proposed "reliable, replacement warheads" or RRWs for the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. That choice, according to several observers, made it unlikely that the government would hand management of the lab over to Northrop, a defense contractor that institutionally has never carried a nuclear weapon through design to production.

"After they had awarded the RRW design, I think it was a fait accompli," said a knowledgeable House staffer. "Did anyone really think they were going to give the contract to another team after that?"