The University of California has not said whether it will bid to
retain management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, but both
the university and its possible rivals are gearing up for
competition.
As the UC Board of Regents continues to wait for the final
request for proposals, which is expected this month, the UC has
formed a tentative coalition with higher education institutions in
New Mexico. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin has rejoined the
competition.
The UC’s contract to manage the Los Alamos nuclear
laboratory and the Lawrence Berkeley lab will run out this year,
and for the first time in its more than 50-year history, the
management of the lab will go up for bid.
The Department of Energy decided to put the labs up for
competition partially as a result of a string of security breaches
and mismanagement issues at Los Alamos in recent years, the most
serious of which effectively closed the lab from July 2004 to
January 2005.
In January the regents decided to bid to continue managing the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, but they will not make a
decision about Los Alamos until the Department of Energy releases
its final request for proposals.
But that hasn’t stopped the university from getting
ready.
The university announced last month that if it competes for the
labs, it will do so in conjunction with the University of New
Mexico, New Mexico State University and the New Mexico Institute
for Mining and Technology.
The alliance, which will form only if the UC regents decide the
UC should bid, would be called the Institute for Advanced Studies,
and its members would cooperate on research at Los Alamos. The
formal agreement with New Mexico institutions is a step toward
competition, but it is not a given that the UC will bid.
George Blumenthal, chair of the UC Academic Senate and a faculty
representative to the regents, said the current draft of the
request for proposals contains worrisome elements.
He said this second draft of the document requires a separate
pension system for Los Alamos employees which would be less
generous than the current UC pension system. He also said he was
worried that a change in the pension system might push employees to
retire for financial reasons.
He added that the current revision is very different from the
first draft, so there is no way of knowing what the final document
might contain.
But Blumenthal said the university has to move along as if it is
planning to compete, because if the university waited until the
regents made their decision, there would be no time to prepare.
Lockheed Martin has taken a more concrete position.
The corporation said it would not bid for Los Alamos when the
first draft of the request for proposals came out in August 2004,
but it has committed to bid under the conditions laid out in the
current version of the document.
Don Carson, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin, said the conditions
of the first draft made bidding look unprofitable for the
corporation, but the new proposal is more attractive.
The DOE’s new draft requires a “separate, stand
alone” pension plan instead of the UC’s current system,
and the establishment of a separate legal entity ““ like a
company’s board of directors ““ to run the lab.
Carson called the UC’s pension plan
“expensive” and “convoluted” and said the
new proposal would let the winner of the contract run Los Alamos
like a business.
“That appeals to Lockheed Martin because that is a model
that we have used at our other labs successfully,” Carson
said, referring to Lockheed Martin’s experience running the
Sandia National laboratory, the Nevada Test site and the Atomic
Weapons Establishment in England.
Chris Harrington, a spokesman for the UC, said additional
competition will not affect the UC’s preparations to bid.
“We are going to prepare the best possible bid, regardless
of what the field looks like,” Harrington said.