The key to understanding the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) bidding saga is recognizing what the Department of Energy isn't telling us about why this bid took place. In 2003, Congress signed an amendment requiring the Department of Energy to put the LANL management contract up for bid, ostensibly in response to a string of public scandals at the laboratory. Earlier that same year, Los Alamos became the first United States laboratory since the end of the Cold War to manufacture a plutonium pit (the fissile trigger that makes a nuclear bomb go "boom"). Therein lies the real story of the LANL bid and why it marked a watershed for the US nuclear weapons complex.

Let's start with the plutonium pits. LANL has always been a nuclear bomb lab, but its main reponsibilites since the 1940s have, at varying points, included weapons research, testing, and maintenance. (1) By 2010, it is slated to begin manufacturing roughly 40 pits a year; in effect, its primary mission will be nuclear design and manufacturing at that point. (2) Congress reaffirmed the DOE's selection of LANL as its new plutonium bomb factory -- taking up that mantle which was last held by the Rocky Plants weapons plant in Colorado, before it was shut down in 1989 -- by announcing LANL as the site for the assembly of Reliable Replacement Warhead bomb cores. (3)

Although it is currently the world's largest nuclear weapons contractor, manufacturing is not the University of California's expertise, nor were UC officials particularly enthusiastic about carrying out LANL's new mission (4). The same cannot be said of the UC's new partners. As long-time manager of the Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 plant in Tennessee -- two of the US' main nuclear manufacturing sites during the Cold War -- BWX Technologies' speciality is manufacturing nuclear bombs. (5) Bechtel, which manages the Nevada Test Site (6), and Washington Group International, which manages the Savannah River Site in South Carolina (7), are likewise inextricably bound to the US nuclear weapons complex and stand to benefit handsomely from its being revitalized.

In the December 22 Washington Post, Project on Government Oversight Executive Director Danielle Brian asked, "What does it take for UC to suffer the consequences of screwing up? Lockheed wasn't a great alternative, but it is hard to see how UC could possibly have been given a vote of confidence." (8)

LANL has been embroiled in countless scandals before, yet its role as manager was never seriously questioned by the federal government as a result. There were perhaps more scandals at the labs during the 1980s -- drug use among lab employees, toxic spills and leaks, employee whistleblowers, potentially-unlawful lobbying of Congress members, etc. -- than there have been in the past five years or so. (9)

Converting Los Alamos into the Department of Energy's new nuclear bomb factory would have been virtually impossible to carry out had the UC remained sole manager of the lab. So, why wasn't the UC punished for screwing up repeatedly at the labs? Because, in the eyes of those who engineer Congressional appropriations for LANL (10), that was never really the point. Rather, the point of the bid was to provide a pretext for bonafide nuclear weapons manufacturer to take over LANL pit production operations, while the UC sits back and continues to provide nuclear weapons science with a much-needed fig leaf of academic legitimacy.

All of this is purely speculative, of course, but I find this version of why the bid took place considerably more plausible than the one given by the DOE.

Sources:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory
2. Fleck, John, “Nuclear Agency Looks to Expand LANL Pit-Making,” Albuquerque Journal, 22 October 2005
3. Ibid
4. Greg Mello. Los Alamos Study Group. http://www.lasg.org/articles/PUprofit12-28-05.htm
5. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/2005/may11.html; www.bwxt.com
6. http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/corporate/dd/bechtel2.html
7. Markoe, Lauren, “Companies Prepare to Vie for SRS Contract,” The State (South Carolina), 17 July 2005
8. Weiss, Rick, "Los Alamos Management Named," Washington Post, 22 December 2005
9. "Management of the University of California Nuclear Weapons Labs," CA Assembly Subcommittee on Higher Education, 12 December 1988
10. In a December 28 op-ed in the Albuquerque Journal, Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group summed up the way LANL appropriations work thusly: "Senator Domenici gets as much money for LANL as possible; the lab gives him the language with which to do so. Since the language is quite technical and Congress is quite busy, usually only a vague pseudo-scientific fig leaf is all that is necessary to hide what is essentially pork-barrel interest. The chair of the House energy and water appropriations subcommittee, David Hobson (R-OH), calls today’s weapons research program “welfare” for scientists and engineers, and few independent observers would disagree."