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UC Wins Contract to Run Los Alamos 100

Posted by samzenpus from the nuclear-hotel-california dept.
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.'"
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UC Wins Contract to Run Los Alamos More

UC Wins Contract to Run Los Alamos

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  • Status quo? More like static.
    Bechtel wins, Haliburton wasn't bidding.

  • The Real Story? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @07:25AM (#14316308) Homepage Journal
    If you're interested, Doug Roberts, a computer scientist who retired from Los Alamos run a blog, titled, LANL: The Real Story" [blogspot.com], further, the same site has a page given over to Running list of wasteful activities at LANL [blogspot.com].

    Part of the deal that had my parents paying for my education was an undergraduate, course load heavy in Economics, Commmerce and Business Law. Having the tools to gain some perspective in how large organizations run, it's instructive to look into the internals of a giant, once prestigious organization like Los Alamos and try to trace the systemic flaws that led to it's current plight.

    • Re:The Real Story? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sane? ( 179855 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:48AM (#14316844)
      The problems detailed are the same problems that are repeated time and again in all government organisations, all over the world. In total the waste is probably in the trillions. At heart the problem is trust and paperwork. Because everyone is so scared to actually trust people, they create masses of paperwork, hierarchy and approvals to make them feel like they are 'managing risk'. Result is "the answer is no, now what's the question?"

      Upshot is either things don't happen, or people go 'around the system' to make things happen. Sometimes that comes back and bites the organisation on the arse.

      Fixing it isn't done by changing the captain of the Titanic, its done by clearing out all the existing processes, all the paperwork, most of the arts graduates claiming to be managers and only adding them back where they can demonstrate real value - and then only in the simplest possible fashion. 'Managing risk' as value is a red flag that suggested solution is a bad one.

      A good half way house is to insist those that ask for a form to be filled in provide the real money out of their budgets for the time taken to do that work, rather than hiding the pain and cost. At least that way people think before implementing new processes.

      The thing I find interesting is exactly the same issues crop up again and again, but the trendy management textbooks never see fit to address these real issues with real solutions - instead focusing on 'enhancing your synagy'. Maybe its because MBAs are at the root the reason these management failures crop up in the first place.

      • Fixing it isn't done by changing the captain of the Titanic, its done by clearing out all the existing processes, all the paperwork, most of the arts graduates claiming to be managers

        Yeah, but who was in charge of setting up these processes, paperwork, and managers. And do you really think the same people will clear them out and start over?

      • You make good points... however Los Alamos is somewhat of a special case. We're talking Plutonium here, people. When it comes to a nuclear weapons lab, you HAVE to maintain safety and security, even if, and even though, you KNOW it kills productivity and drives up cost. Nuclear disaster is not an option.
        • No doubt, but if you look at "The Real Story" you'll see they're not fussing over plutonium, they're fussing over color printers. They have operations issues.

          I guess that's not surprising considering they're in New Mexico and probably have a low-rent IT staff. If I'm a nuclear scientist, I might move to Los Alamos but if I'm an SA, what's the attraction?

      • Re:The Real Story? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mengel ( 13619 ) <mengel@users.sou ... rge.net minus pi> on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:22AM (#14317605) Homepage Journal
        The other big problem is perennial budget uncertainty -- National Labs never know from one year to the next what their budget might be, as it literally takes an Act of Congress to renew the funding each and every year, and especially the last few years, it's rarely been anywhere near on time. Add to that the fact that sometimes the DOE takes budget back partway through the year...

        It means that things you should buy, but that aren't absolutely critical, often get delayed until the Mad September Purchasing Rush, when folks actually know what's left in their budget. This can mean that new database server to let you build the tracking system for something you really ought to have been tracking already is delayed 6 months to a year... Or you don't get training you should, or hire staff you should, not because there isn't budget for it, but because you don't know if there is budget for it.

        Just repeat that sort of cycle for 10 years or so, and things can get kind of out of hand.

        • Let me start with a Arguement from Authority [wikipedia.org] - You should listen to me, because I work at LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) so I know all about this stuff ... LOL.

          But seriously, my opinion is this: Your first point (about not knowing the next year's budget numbers) is true, but the management minimises that problem by saving some funds into any number of accounts, so they can shift them as they need to. I also have to disagree with your second paragraph somewhat:

          1. You ignore the issue of scale
      • Absolutely true. Frankly, I think this is one of the biggest challenges for government in the next century.

        Free-market absolutists may think they're going to "drown government in the bathtub", but the rest of us know that grow or shrink, government is here to stay, so we'd better get cracking on figuring out how it can go about modernizing itself and shedding obsolete or useless rules and management structures. In the private sector, one of the good side effects of acquisitions is that it provides a gold
        • This already happened at Oak Ridge: the management of the classified weapons infrastructure,
          i.e. the Y-12 facility, was divorced from that of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is now a scientific institution. ORNL gained by now having a University on its management (where previously all of ORNL & Y-12 & K-25 had been a succession of not very good companies, Dow, MartinMarietta-->Lockheed, etc...)

          Maybe the same will happen at LANL as well---note that they brought in private-sector contrac

      • A lot of the waste is due to failure to filly analyse risks and cost cutting measures. A good example is air travel. They insist on refundable tickets "so they won't lose money if something goes wrong". Of course, they fail to consider that refundable tickets cost 3 times as much and that the flight is actually boarded more than 33% of the time.

        As you point out, they happily pay big overheads to contain small risks for another net loss.

        What it comes down to is that they don't so much manage costs as man

  • Wow, so a University is now running an entire city. That's freaky!

    Still, got to be better than Bush!
    • Not surprising, since some universities are as big as small towns & some towns are dependent on universities alone, and universities usually have an efficient bureaucracy in place, and tend to have balanced budgets.
    • I'm fairly confident they're just using 'Los Alamos' as an ill-conceived shortened form of Los Alamos National Laboratory. It's common if you live in New Mexico, in my experience. Delicious ambiguity.

      However, since you bashed Bush, all misunderstandings are naturally excused!
    • Who said there is was a "city" of Los Alamos?

      However, there is a county of Los Alamos. It has the highest concentration of PhD's of any county in the nation.

  • Not strictly a UC win (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Angstroman ( 747480 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @07:35AM (#14316342)
    While the University of California will be deeply involved in the new management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is not strictly correct to call this a win for UC. As the DOE press release [doe.gov] makes clear, the winner of the competition was a limited liability corporation comprised of UC, Bechtel [bechtel.com], BWX Technologies [bwxt.com] and others. The difference is very significant in some areas. For example, LANL personnel will no longer be members of the UC staff and participants in their retirement system, but employees of the LLC. The DOE did not release details of the winning proposal yet. As they do, I believe it will become increasingly clear that there is much more to this change than just UC continuing to play the same role.
    • Wow. so where does the employees' juicy TIAA/CREF pension fund end up?

    • Re:Not strictly a UC win (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:05AM (#14317410)
      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'm starting a postdoc at Los Alamos in a month. From discussions I have had with people there, this is a good thing. After Lockheed Martin took over Sandia National Lab, publications declined as they focused research on core programs. In addition, the increased focus on classified programs at Sandia had several foreign nationals concerned about their future at LANL. As a postdoc, it doesn't affect me much either way, but permanent employees are likely better off with UC stll in charge.

      Sam

  • Abivalence (Score:5, Insightful)

    by putko ( 753330 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @07:38AM (#14316353) Homepage Journal
    There's been a lot of ambivalence at Berkeley in the past about it running labs like this. One line (not that I believe it) goes that it is better for the Univeristy involved than leave it strictly to the defense contractors.

    I think it provides UC with some serious money and opportunity to do major research, so the geeks get attracted to it and tend to brush over any ethical concerns.

    E.g. who else has the budget and inclination for some serious computin'?

    Similar stuff happened at MIT in the beginning of computing. It was somehow harmless when it was just Ma Bell wanting telephone switching technology -- but the defense contractors have budgets and interesting requirements, so it is easy to look the other way.

    • Re:Abivalence (Score:2, Informative)

      by Angstroman ( 747480 )

      I think it provides UC with some serious money and opportunity to do major research, so the geeks get attracted to it and tend to brush over any ethical concerns.

      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. Whi

    • Re:Abivalence (Score:3, Informative)

      by metlin ( 258108 )
      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

      • Re:Abivalence (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jimhill ( 7277 )
        "I used to work at LANL ... I can almost see the folks at LANL partying over this."

        Well, I still work at LANL and believe me, there's no partying going on here. The feeling is one of shock and disbelief that an organization which so badly mismanaged the institution that it lost its 63-year no-bid, no-compete contract is rewarded by being given (a share of) the management of the institution. Once the revised RFP came out last year which drummed up additional bidders by guaranteeing our pensions would be de

  • Nice (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Cmdr_earthsnake ( 939669 )
    Nice, a university running a city, good universities like the one described are often full of bright, mature, and great working people bursting ith inspiration.

    Why not let them unleash their glowing intelligence on a city and help improve the management of the laboratory for science?

    • Re:Nice (Score:3, Funny)

      by Oxygen99 ( 634999 )
      lol, and while you're at it, do you want to send out the invites to the Municipal Fortress of Vengeance [wikipedia.org] or shall I?
    • UC does not and never has "run the city," as you put it. The County of Los Alamos is in charge of that (well, more concisely, the City Council).

      LANL is big enough to be its own city, but is "across the bridge" from the actual town.
      • You mean the County Council.
        There is no City of Los Alamos.

        Los Alamos is an "Incorporated County".
        I wonder if there is any other such county in the country?

        Anybody know?

  • Other labs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @07:53AM (#14316406) Journal
    The postings are interesting. It appears that other labs are being grabbed by the original university that managed it AND a large company. For example, BWXT teams with University of Chicago for Argonne Lab. This makes me wonder if this is the wholesale sell-off of our R&D labs to private enterprise. IOW, will these companies now have unfettered access to all the ideas that comes from these labs and will declare them their own? I only mention this because of the large system support contract that GWB awarded Accenture (a company of crooks and inepts) a HUGE contract that takes place overseas. They not only pull the jobs away but much of the code is now being done elsewhere. IIRC, Accenture will have partial ownership as well as will be in control of a large number of federal systems.

    • Re:Other labs (Score:3, Informative)

      by bullsbarry ( 862452 )
      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.

      • Re:Other labs (Score:1, Redundant)

        by WindBourne ( 631190 )
        Yeah, that is kind of what concerns me. See, up this point, anything developed in LLNL or LANL, was licensed OUT of there to others to use. IOW, my tax dollar went into research of which some created a revenue stream. Now, depending on how things were written, my tax dollar may be going into research, which may then belong to the company and which I will have to pay more tax dollars to get back. Worse, all compitition for the rights could be gone.

        When I have done work for the Feds, we licensed our stuff ba

  • UCs new marketing slogan launched! (Score:3, Funny)

    by jurt1235 ( 834677 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @07:56AM (#14316415) Homepage
    UC, for students who want to glow in the dark.

  • Wrong UC (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gearmonger ( 672422 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:03AM (#14316644)
    UC = University of Cincinnati, at least per the domain registry. www.uc.edu [uc.edu]
    • University of California has many campuses and many domains. Think UC Berkely, UCSD, UC Irvine, UC Davis, UC Riverside, UCSF, etc... So as you can see the University of California is huge, and not just that famous one south of San Francisco.
  • NASA really needs to get out of the business of micromanaging their research centers and let consortiums of universities and private industry run them like the DOE does. It'd probably be much more efficient to not have to employ expensive civil servants.

    • A few things that you might not be aware of, or failed to give proper consideration:

      1. NASA research centers are required to bid for contracts ... often against universities and private industry. If a research center has contracts, it's because they were judged to have the better bid.
      2. A significant percentage of the people at NASA research centers are contractors. (I've heard it's as much as 2:1 contractor:civil servant ratio)
      3. Getting rid of the older civil servants could cost the government more.

      The las

      • # A significant percentage of the people at NASA research centers are contractors. (I've heard it's as much as 2:1 contractor:civil servant ratio)

        Oh, I'm aware of this since I'm a contractor. If contractors create such fluid and dynamic disposable workforce that adjusts to changing budgets then perhaps all employees of NASA should be contractors so you don't have to deal with long and arduous RIF processes to downsize staff. I've watched hundreds of my fellow contractors get laid off so far due to budg

    • The notion that contractors to the government are intrinsically better than civil servants, especially in scientific jobs, is far from being true.

      What *really* happens when you have a contractor is that the government doesn't actually save that much money--or could even lose lots of money.

      Why? Because of all the rules: the government still has to hire people to check the paperwork of the contractors, and on the contractor side there has to be an army of people and procedures and forms to interface with the
  • The other side of the story not being told is that the loser just spent a crapload of money putting together a detailed award proposal and probably never had a real chance in the first place. I've been on that side of the deal too. When you bid this stuff it is hard to know if this is an honest offer unless you (illegally) have someone on the inside feeding you information. At lot of big contracts, especially government ones, have outcomes decided before the bidding even starts.
  • I knew someone who worked in the IT department at LANL who was a total security risk. Two words: Airhead Bimbo.

    Fortunately for LANL she's working elsewhere now.
  • I misread the article title as "UAC Wins Contract to Run Los Alamos", and my first thought was "So this is how it all begins..."
  • I think Caltech should of taken over Los Alamos. Los Alamos would be a Caltech 'Department'. :-)
    Just like JPL is a department of Caltech. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]

    But then I'm biased, I work at Caltech.
  • "...shaken by allegations and revelations of theft, fraud, security lapses and lax oversight.'"

    Theft occurs because of security lapses.

    Fraud occurs because of lax oversight.

    Why do people feel compelled, when posting new stories, to be so wordy?

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