U. of California Will Retain Management Role at Lawrence Livermore Weapons Lab
Chronicle of Higher Education 5/9/07
The announcement means that the university system has again defied Congressional critics, who have pummeled it over continuing security breaches at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The team that won the Livermore contract is virtually the same as the one that won a competition in 2005 to manage Los Alamos (The Chronicle, January 6, 2006). The department has also allowed the university to continue its sole management of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (The Chronicle, April 20, 2005).
Until the recent competitions, the university had managed all three laboratories by itself for decades without having to bid for contracts. California has operated Livermore since it opened, in 1952, as the University of California Radiation Laboratory.
But that changed after Congressional critics in both parties pressed for competitions, alleging that the university had a poor record of fixing multiple security lapses beginning in the 1990s. As a result, the Energy Department has begun putting up for bid the contracts to run all 10 of its national laboratories.
Besides California, the team chosen to run Livermore includes the Texas A&M University System, which will conduct research related to combating the global proliferation of nuclear weapons. Major partners on the team, called Lawrence Livermore National Security LLC, include Bechtel National Inc., BWX Technologies, and the Washington Group International. Other partners are the Battelle Memorial Institute and four business subcontractors.
Energy Department officials said on Tuesday that they expected the new management team at Livermore to improve the lab's operations in all respects, including security. But the department said the same thing in December 2005, when it awarded the Los Alamos contract -- only to be embarrassed by a new security breach last October, when authorities discovered thousands of pages of classified material from the lab in a contractor's trailer home.
Livermore has experienced less-serious problems, like the loss of keys to perimeter gates and office doors in 2003.
"It is ridiculous that after years of security breaches and safety debacles, DOE would decide that the best way to fix these problems is by hiring the same incompetent contractors," said Peter Stockton, senior investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group based here.
The lab's current director, George H. Miller, will continue in that role under the new management. The management team's Board of Governors will be led by Gerald L. Parsky, who is also a regent of the University of California.
Although California will participate in all aspects of managing Livermore, including security, the university will focus on its strength -- managing "the world-class science and technology they're known for," said Walter Epps, who led an Energy Department board that evaluated bids for the contract.
The contract, which takes in effect in October, is for $297.5-million over seven years and is renewable for up to an additional 13 years.
The team that submitted the losing bid was led by Northrup Grumman Technical Services. That bid was only slightly more costly than the winning one, but it did not score as well on scientific merit, said C.S. (Tyler) Przybylek, the department official who awarded the contract.
The lack of a university partner "could have" affected that lower score, said Mr. Epps, although the reviewers did not specifically examine that question.
As with the Los Alamos contract, Livermore's new managers will offer the lab's existing employees a pension plan that is "substantially similar" to the one they now receive as employees of the University of California. However, new employees at Livermore will get a less-generous plan offering a 401(k).
When the Los Alamos deal was announced, outside observers predicted that the new pension arrangements could help push that lab's scientists to leave for other, more-attractive jobs. There were also concerns that a change in management might erode the academic freedom that the university had allowed lab employees, such as their ability to collaborate with outside scientists on nonclassified aspects of their research.
Those concerns have not been realized since the new team began managing Los Alamos, in June, said Sidney D. Drell, an emeritus professor at the Stanford University Linear Accelerator Center and one of 11 members of the Los Alamos management team's Board of Governors. However, Mr. Drell, who had voiced such concerns, said, "It's been too short a time to declare, 'Mission accomplished.'"