"It really showed that we need to integrate a more industrial culture with a more academic culture." University of Texas System Chancellor Mark Yudof, July 19, 2005.
A truck bouncing through the arid Albuquerque, New Mexico terrain, loaded down with the final proposal of a team including the UT System and Lockheed Martin to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory, has cemented University involvement in a bid for the lab.
Sixty years ago to the week, the two-year rush to build a nuclear weapon culminated with the first successful atomic detonation. The Trinity Test, on July 16, 1945, put Los Alamos in a permanent spotlight; now that spotlight might be headed toward Austin.
Campus dialogue on the bid has been scant, with opposition primarily reserved for members of UT Watch. Justifiably, most opposition has been moral: Why would the System, and the University, want to align itself so closely with dangerous research on the most lethal weapons known to man?
Most University students have shown little interest. A Student Government survey of over 500 students in January found that 34 percent supported a Los Alamos bid, 17 percent did not and 49 percent had no opinion.
But to understand what the University stands to get itself into, and why members of the University community should remain vigilant, one must look deeper than the nagging security concerns, the 3.2 metric tons of enriched uranium, the 2.7 metric tons of plutonium or the morality of weapons of mass destruction. One must go back two years to when the contract for Los Alamos was first put in question.
In April 2003, then-Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham declared the University of California System responsible for the systematic failures in management at the lab, suggesting the government's no-bid contract with the University of California System dating back to 1943 would expire soon. Abraham cited specifically that their performance in business services needed to be as good as its performance in science.
A Department of Energy report soon mirrored this language, stating that the culture at Los Alamos "exalted science and devalued business practices and that changing this attitude would be the most difficult long-term challenge facing the laboratory."
Only a week after Abraham's announcement, the UT System had expressed interest, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) initiated the bidding process by June of 2004. Many groups, public and private, considered management.
But interest in the bid waned, with speculative management conditions and compensation similar to those under current management (the UC System is paid about $8.7 million annually to run the lab). On Aug. 7, 2004, corporate front-runner Lockheed Martin announced it would pull out of its bid for Los Alamos, saying it was too costly.
In December 2004, the NNSA announced a Request for Proposal, which offered to compensate managers of Los Alamos about thrice the previous amount at near $30 million annually; most groups remained standoffish.
By mid-January, both Chancellor Yudof and Board of Regents Chairman James Huffines agreed to cease pursuit of the lab. System spokesperson Randa Safady then said, "We were always going to have a partner or partners involved in the process, we just never found that right match, the right mix of us and industrial partners." Most campus concerns for Los Alamos were soon quelled.
But around the nation, the gears kept grinding.
Enter Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, who is the chair of the House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee.
Hobson - who received $32,500 in contributions from every private firm involved in the final bids for Los Alamos during his 2004 reelection campaign (including a hefty $8,000 from Lockheed and $5,000 from Bechtel, according to data on www.opensecrets.org as of May 16) - has been one of the most outspoken opponents of a bid favoring the UC System.
In prepared remarks to the Arms Control Association on Feb. 3, Hobson encouraged more competition for the bid, and said, "I had hoped the Los Alamos rebid was an opportunity for the Department of Energy to structure an RFP that encourages a new type of contracting team that brings both scientific excellence and management and industrial operation expertise."
Five days later, Hobson sent a letter to Secretary of Energy Sam Bodman, saying, "I interpret their business decisions to avoid this contract as very strong evidence that the [Request for Proposals] is flawed." He also urged an increase in the management fee and to cut the requirement that "the winning proposal has to maintain the current pension benefit package."
On Feb. 18, a mere 10 days after Hobson's letter, a new RFP appeared, offering up to $79 million annual compensation to new lab management. The updated proposal also included a plan to phase out the current UC pension plan, potentially saving millions, and required the new contractor to create a separate legal entity - most likely a limited liability corporation, similar to the setup Lockheed Martin currently has at Sandia National Laboratory.
On March 29, Lockheed Martin again announced a plan to bid for Los Alamos. The company was not so subtle about its intentions.
Don Carson, a Lockheed Martin spokesman, told The Washington Post, "[The new RFP] made our business people go back and take a look and say, 'It looks like the things they added make it a decent business opportunity.'"
Less than a week later, on April 6, Chairman Huffines asked Chancellor Yudof to "take another look" at the bid. Coincidentally, on the same day, the UT System signed a memorandum of understanding with Sandia, formalizing a relationship between the institutions.
On April 11, Lockheed Martin announced that C. Paul Robinson, who was then the director of Sandia, would step down and chair the bid for Los Alamos. He was lauded by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who said, "I believe Paul Robinson's decision is significant because of the expertise he will bring to the Lockheed Martin bid."
Robinson had worked at Los Alamos from 1967 to 1985, eventually becoming head of the nuclear weapons program, and has been at Sandia since 1990. If the Lockheed-Texas bid is successful, he is likely to become the director of Los Alamos.
The System officially re-opened discussions for a bid on April 28, a venture in which Chancellor Yudof called Lockheed Martin a "majority partner."
The fate of the bids now falls in the hands of Tyler Przybylek, who is chairman of the board of the NNSA. In May he subtly praised Lockheed Martin for its management of Sandia, saying efficiency at the lab has saved $65 million. He has stated that "what people will see over time is good operations and good business aren't the enemies of great science; they enable it."
It is increasingly clear that private corporations will have a heavy hand in operations beginning June 1, 2006, the date on which whomever wins the bid takes over. This is important to the Lockheed-Texas bid, as the incumbent UC System seems to lead the opposing bid with Bechtel.
But what does it matter if a private corporation is interested in running the show at Los Alamos?
While there is concern that some scientists may have issues with a private firm at the helm (former Los Alamos physicist Brad Holian recently told The San Francisco Chronicle, "The Bush administration was hell-bent on privatizing Los Alamos, and that will be done"), a more foreboding issue remains: Corporations stand to profit from the resurgence of nuclear weapons testing and creation.
Universities would certainly stand to profit from involvement in the lab (Yudof said last summer that "if they happen to discover something, patent it, create a new business, a new product line - this is the economic future of Texas"). But renewed weapons development is in the best interest of a company looking to please its No. 1 constituents - stock holders.
A July 7 report in The Economist discussed this scenario and the majority of experiments that are ongoing at the three national laboratories that work with nuclear weapons - Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The programs regard "stockpile stewardship," which seeks to insure the functionality of America's aging fleet of nukes.
Since nuclear testing was halted in 1992, researchers are looking into other means of determining how a deteriorating warhead will detonate.
Some projects include computer simulations and X-ray imaging of non-fissile material, but a site planned for Lawrence Livermore called the National Ignition Facility would use a series of lasers to "access regimes of extreme pressure and temperature" to perform so-called stockpile stewardship testing without nuclear detonation.
The NIF was slated to be completed in 2003 at a price tag of $1.4 billion, but the lab is still an estimated four years from completion (and already another $1.4 billion over budget).
On July 1 of this year, Robinson's friend Sen. Domenici proposed an amendment in an energy and water appropriations bill to completely halt construction at the NIF, according to the report by The Economist. The Senate approved the measure.
Furthermore, The Economist notes, "Three recent internal reviews of the facility by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy go so far as to suggest that without [the NIF] America would move closer to resuming nuclear testing."
If Lockheed Martin became the "majority partner" at Los Alamos, assuring them final word over the University and our coalition of the willing (our quasi-consortium network of 33 universities to assist in research at Los Alamos), there is nothing stopping the lab from heeding the wish of Congress should they authorize new weapons activity.
In a time when North Korea's Kim Jong Il plays with uranium one day and orders all his male citizens to have hair cuts matching his the next, that prospect could be disastrous.
On July 16, 2004, Chancellor Yudof gave a speech at a Board of Regents meeting in support of a bid for Los Alamos. In it, he said, "At base, the purpose of national laboratories is to give the government - and through the government, the people - unbiased information about science. And universities, through their own research and affiliation with national laboratories, play a vital role in developing that information."
His words still ring true today. But when our University and country has the chance of getting taken for a ride, and that most holy of information stands to be hijacked for profit, it's time to rethink where the University of Texas System stands in the "profound service we would be providing the nation."
Hermes is a physics senior and managing editor of the Texas Travesty.
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