University of California officials have come one step closer to deciding on whether to continue managing the nation’s nuclear laboratories. At the Sept. 22 UC Board of Regents meeting, the UC President’s Council on the National Laboratories recommended that the university combine with a corporate industrial partner and make a bid in the competition for management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The two laboratories are owned by the Department of Energy and have been managed by University of California since their inception. Built under the direction of UC physicist Robert Oppenheimer in 1943, the Los Alamos lab administered the first atomic bomb designs. The Livermore lab was established later in 1952 as another site for weapons design.
A law was passed last year mandating that the labs, along with the UC-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, seek competitive bids for management rights. The regents will make a final decision on whether the university will bid after it receives and reviews the D.O.E.’s request for proposals, which will detail the department’s expectations for management offers.
“[Making a bid] is the long-term normal default decision for all concerned — the regents, the [UC] president and the council,” said Herbert York, a member of the council and the former director of UCSD’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. “Something very special would be needed to change any minds.”
The university will consider a variety of factors in reviewing the D.O.E.’s requests and deciding whether to compete for the contracts, including a focus on science, technology and research freedom, according to UC spokesman Chris Harrington.
A series of incidents in recent years have raised the question of whether the university is still qualified to manage the three labs. In June, two storage devices containing classified information were reported missing at Los Alamos. In July, the Project on Government Oversight — a government watchdog group critical of UC management — revealed that classified lab information had been sent over unsecured e-mail systems 17 times over the course of several months. A laser accident during the summer also injured an intern.
In response to these incidents, administrators shut down the Los Alamos lab and suspended 23 employees. The lab is expected to reopen soon.
“The UC has had one management failure after another in the last several years,” said Peter Stockton, senior investigator at the Project on Government Oversight. “Responsibility and accountability starts at the top. The people who were dismissed [over the summer] were lower-level people … and we weren’t exactly too happy with that.”
Stockton said he believes that combining with a corporate partner would be the best step for the university, should it choose to bid in the competition.
“Whoever wins the competition is fine with us, but I assume [the University of California] will combine with a corporate partner who will have better management skills,” Stockton said.
Another government watchdog group, the Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, has been advocating for a more open contracting process for the labs. Known as Tri-Valley CAREs, the group has pushed for the past 15 years for the conversion of the Los Alamos and Livermore labs into civilian science-based labs similar to the Berkeley lab, which currently performs no classified military research.
“We’ve been disappointed at the reluctance of the regents to transforming the Los Alamos laboratory and the Livermore laboratory into civilian science-based labs,” said Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs. “We think the University of California may be an appropriate manager of civilian science-based labs. There’s a lot of scientific research that should be done in the national interest.”
Tri-Valley CAREs, which is also considering making a bid in the competition, has argued that in addition to management issues, the mission of the labs should also be addressed.
“The question isn’t whether we need scientists, the question is what we should employ those scientists for,” Kelley said. “We would like to question the services of two full-scale Armageddon labs.”
However, many UC faculty members hope that the regents will decide to compete for the bid.
An Academic Senate survey released in June showed that 67 percent of the UC faculty support a university bid on the labs. Many faculty members have research relationships with the labs, according to York.
The request for the Los Alamos bid is tentatively expected in January, with the Livermore request following later in 2005. No concrete timetable has been set for the Berkeley lab. The regents are currently taking actions that will allow the university to preserve the option of bidding, Harrington said.
