The U.S. Department of Energy formally opens competition today for three top federal labs that the University of California has operated since their creation in the 1940s and '50s.

A Federal Register notice will serve as the starting gun. Close to a dozen potential bidders are jockeying to run Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear-weapons design labs and the institutional parent, Lawrence Berkeley lab, which does unclassified research.

Congress last year ordered immediate contract competition for all three labs, plus two run by the University of Chicago and Iowa State University.

At stake is who will operate a scientific empire as large as San Francisco that employs 18,000 people in California and New Mexico. Half are scientists or engineers, most of them contributors in one way or another to the design and maintenance of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The Berkeley lab, perched on a hill over UC's first campus, is where academia and the U.S. government first joined in the name of Big Science in the late 1930s.

Technically, the University of California's tenure in charge there runs out Saturday. But Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham will take the pro-forma step this week of extending UC's contract to January 2005.

That yearlong delay suggests the competition for the Berkeley lab contract may proceed on a faster schedule than the competitions at Los Alamos and Livermore, where existing contracts won't expire until 2005.

The Energy Department still is working on a schedule for the competitions, said agency spokesman Joe Davis. The timetable will orchestrate dates for bidders to state their interest, the Energy Department to release bidding specifications, the submittal of bid packages, award of the contracts and negotiations over final details.

Few will pay as much attention to this timetable as UC executives in Oakland, who alone of the potential bidders are preparing to fight for all three labs.