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UC Wins Contract to Run Los Alamos
crlove writes "LA Times reports, 'The University of California today won its hard-fought bid to continue operating the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, beating back a challenge from a Lockheed Corp.-University of Texas team to run the nuclear weapons research facility...
For months, the New Mexico laboratory had been shaken by allegations and revelations of theft, fraud, security lapses and lax oversight.'"
As an employee of a private contractor who works at a R&D lab for the DOD, I can tell you that all of our work is considered government property. We are allowed to get patents/retain rights to any "intellectual property" we develop, but for the most part our work becomes the government's work.
There may be a number of motivations, but it is not likely that money has been a large one...at least up to now. In the original LANL contract with UC, the maximum fee was $8.7M (about 0.4% of the LANL operating budget). Maximum because it could (and has been) reduced based on the DOE evaluation of performance relative to contract criteria. While that may sound like a lot of money, it is very small compared to the UC total research budget and certainly extremely small when viewed in the light of the controversy and difficulty of managing the Laboratory.
One of the things that the source selection board discovered in trying to solicit serious industrial interest was that the fee was too small. Even though they started with a much larger fee in the original solicitation, they had to double it in order to attract industrial participants. The fee for managing Los Alamos now stands at $79M, nine times the original fee. It is hoped that this increased fee will be recouped by improvements in efficiency.
There is a joke that goes, in heaven the british are the policemen, french are the cooks, and the german's build the cars, the swiss mind the banks and the Italians are the lovers. But in hell, the british are the cooks, the italians mind the banks, the french build the cars, the swiss are the lovers and the germans are the policemen.
Bechtel has a repuation for good facilites management provided you tell them exactly what you want up front and it's not unusual. They also have a reputation for not being interested in the purpose of the task, but rather the task it self, and thus may not perform the task with their thinking caps on. They will be focused on hitting the perfromance marks in the contract just well enough to collect their fee and these pesky scientist will be an annoyance. Conversely, UC is truly interested in promoting long term great science. It goes so far that direction it gets in its own way in achieving that: it management is not agressive and tolerates its own bad managers. People who fail tend to get promoted up to get them out of the way of the front line scientists. And they can manage their own facilities because they never figured out how to manage something that was not their own campus funded by donors. And UC regents never had the time to focus on the lab long enough to deal with this.
So if we get Bechtel facilities, UC science mission guidance, and a strong focused management LLC , this will be heaven. If we get Bechtel science, UC management, a weak LLC managemnt paralyzed by two masters it will be hell. If any one of these organzations is fully in charge it will be not so good either, but if no one is in charge it will be chaos.
No one has seen the management structure plan as the contract has not been negotiated. But repeatedly the bid advisory board and bid selection folks kept volunteering the phrase that the best attributes of these institutions were to be combined under a single LLC roof with sole responsibility. That's the perfect recipie for success. The question is if they can pull off the creation of such an organization.
Another burning issue is that los alamos is a remote city. It does not reside in an ocean of interchangable labor or contracting companies. If this is to succeed the management needs to import some new leaders, and then figure out how to not rehire the same contractors or at least how to incentivize them.
The othe rpart of the problem is NM is a small state which gives at lot to the governement. It provides two national lab, multiple air bases, testing ranges, and an unusually high fraction of its citizens join the armed forces. It burys the nations nuclear waste, and one time even let an atomic boms to be set off. As a result it gets a lot of federal dollars that it has a hard time protecting from other congressmen. Hosting military bases and national labs is not pork like say a bridge to nowhere but a legitimate national service. The trouble is it's only got two senators and three congressmen. THis makes Los Alamos a target for exaggerated claims of mismanagement. Most of these are ludicrous. For example the Loss rate of unaccountable inventory is smaller than almost any government institution or industry. It's far from the only National lab to mislay a sensitive data disk, but it's the only one you have ever heard mentioned in the press. And you never hear the follow-up stories. Like the famous mustang bought on a credit card--didn't happen turns out. Like the famous "Lost" hard disks that turned out to be simply a keystroke error that printed out more labels than there were disks.
There's plenty of problems at los alamos but nearly all of them come from a combination of congressional funding that gets redirected when stronger congressmen redirect it to their state , DOE carpiciousness and insane levels of oversight, and UC's weak management structure. The new LLC is supposed to remove DOE oversight and make it more of a performance contract in hindsight. And we may be getting rid of UC's spineless management style.
So we are guardedly optomistic this could be heaven.
I used to work at LANL, and if UC had not won the bid, it would have been a big deal. For the most part, LANL used go get singularly blamed for incidents that were trivial while other labs (e.g. Sandia) would never even get a mention for far worse thing. LANL almost became a bugaboo and it seemed that people sought to make an "example" out of it, for whatever reason.
:)
Despite everything, it's one of the greatest of places to work at and UC is a fantastic employer.
The whole problem at LANL was more because of politics than anything else. I, for one, am glad that UC won the bid - they deserved this, and did not deserve what was going on there.
I can almost see the folks at LANL partying over this.
Sam