Domenici: Los Alamos National Lab Faces Period of Change
Aug. 6–New management of Los Alamos National Laboratory will lead the lab into a period of great change in the next decade, U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said Friday.
The management will likely be more hands-on, Domenici said during an interview in Santa Fe, and the lab must unify around keeping its status as a leader in nuclear weapons development.
He also said employee pensions should be protected at the lab, a major employer in Northern New Mexico.
Two coalitions of private companies and universities are competing for the contract to run the lab for the first time since its inception in 1943.
The U.S. Department of Energy is scheduled to pick a winner by December.
The lab has been managed by the University of California since it was established to develop the world’s first atomic bomb.
“It’s obvious that the department intends, and I think it’s right, to ask that the management be different,” Domenici said. ” … And so now it looks like that management is going to be much more hands-on. And that’s what the bidders are responding to. If you look at the bid, they’re putting companies and institutions together with expertise. And they’re both terrific applications.”
The University of California, Bechtel International and BWX Technologies make up one bidding team, called Los Alamos National Security. Lockheed Martin Corp., the University of Texas and other schools are in a coalition called Los Alamos Alliance LLC.
All details of the bids have not been made public. But Domenici addressed whether the roughly 8,000 University of California employees will keep their pensions with a new manager.
“I’m trying my best to tell the people up there that it’s not very probable, maybe not even possible, that whoever gets this bid will be antagonistic toward the rights of the employees,” Domenici said. “So they better have in their bids, and I think they do, some assurances for our men and women scientists up there that their pensions are going to be solid.”
Domenici has said he hopes the University of California would continue managing the lab, which has a $2.2 billion annual budget and a huge impact on New Mexico’s economy.
But both teams have put together great proposals, he added.
The next decade will be a time of great change in the labs, he said.
“Because it’s quite obvious that the world has changed in terms of nuclear power, nuclear military power. And it’s no big secret that the United States would like very much to have a completely different arsenal: less in numbers, smaller in size. … As soon as you talk about that, you’ve got to build a different kind of weapon.”
But maintaining the nation’s current nuclear weapons, a mission called stockpile stewardship, will still be the focus. “Sooner or later there will be some big thinking on what do we do.
For now we are going to make science-based stockpile stewardship work.”
Domenici, who has served in the Senate since 1972, also emphasized the importance of keeping a good working environment for scientists.
“The laboratory is still too complicated for the scientists to be able to go out and do their jobs,” he said. “It is too burdened with overlapping bureaucracy and regulations. And I know, and the scientists have been pleading with us to do something about it.”
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