Why the new Los Alamos Labs management deal matters
There are a number of issues relevant to this, and I will lay them out in bullet form.
* First, I am happy that the crown jewel nuclear lab is not subject to management by a profit making defense company (the competing offer was from Lockheed Martin/U Texas, but Lockheed Martin was the main driver). I happen to feel that nuclear weapons ARE qualitatively different and would much rather see the primary contractor be the University of California (with Bechtel). Lockheed Martin runs Sandia National Labs, also important in the weapons complex though not a principle design/development lab like Los Alamos or Livermore, and has for several years been co-manager of the chief British nuclear weapons lab. I would be rather concerned if they first grabbed Los Alamos and then potentially Livermore.I don't like the idea of one company getting a near monopoly over these things.
*Second, earlier in my career, I despaired over the University of California running Livermore and Los Alamos (what business does this state university have doing it?) But given that the university culture puts science first and profits last, this is good in light of the need to update our existing nuclear weapons. Plutonium has a half life of 25000 years, but given the high energy of the alpha particles emitted on decay, the warheads are strongly damaged as a function of time even on the human scale. Tritium decays away from thermonuclear warheads more rapidly. Accordingly, at the very least, we have to manufacture replacement plutonium `pits' if we want to keep our warheads viable. (Here you can argue, but given that the nuclear cat has long been out of the bag, I consider a viable deterrent force of at least a few hundred warheads probably essential from the realpolitik perspective.) This was formerly done at the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, but contamination closed that site years ago, and it has been restarted in an ad hoc way at Los Alamos.
SO how does this connect? Lockheed wants tomake money and has in the past shown a willingness to sell demonstrably worthless systems to the government (such as the current missile defense program). I don't want a company with that mindset holding the keys to our nuclear program. I can see where that goes--new weapons that make us less safe by their existence and ability to encourage proliferation. No thank you.
*Third, the Bechtel connection might help redress the genuine management problems that beset Los Alamos over the years of complacent UC management. There were many bogus ones-see the last point. I need to be convinced of this, but it is clear UC drives, Bechtel follows in this collaboration, whereas in the other Lockheed drove and Texas was to follow.
*Fourth, there was an obvious set of Rovian dirty poltiics at play trumping up the problems at the lab, all overstated dramatically. It might surprize TPMCafe readers that this administration would want a strong Texas AND industrial connection at Los Alamos. This would further their new nukes ambitions and their desire to step out of nonratified participation in the comprehensive test ban treaty.
This suggests to me that the plate is too filled with scandal and Iraq now for the Bush Co guys to push on this one.
All in all, a day of mixed blessings, but I can smile at least over the fillibuster of ANWR and the Los Alamos management decision.
A fellow Los Alamos denizen or expat?
If neither, and if you're interested in what the natives think, I
recommend this
blog. My own highly-opinionated but somewhat-informed (I grew up
and interned there) impression is that LANL has been going downhill
for a long time, and that going from UC to UC-plus-Bechtel is, while
probably a surprising improvement over UT-plus-Lockheed, not an
absolute "win." The thing to watch here seems to me to be the
pension. LANL retirement was a sweet deal, but does it stay that way?
December 22, 2005 12:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Frequent visitor, not expat or past denizen.
The pension will be a key deal, but as you probably know, the terrific UC pension was stripped from the lab as an essential aspect of any bid (to presumably take away that big UC advantage). Frankly, I know of no pension system that is comparable anywhere in the public or private sector, so I can only see that going down hill.
December 22, 2005 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
We have wondered why UT was not selected. The question was directly asked at the press conference, but not answered.
Hmmm. Rovian dirty politics. I had not heard about these charges of ungentlemanly behavior to gain this contract.
What makes you think these tactics originated from DC and not Austin?
December 22, 2005 3:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
At one point UT was directly interested in leading a bid then aw what was involved and backed away. Lockheed asked them on to their proposal. Given the stern warning from Spencer Abraham early in the Bush administration to Los Alamos, I believe this was an extension of efforts to strip it from UC that go back to republican congressional hearings in the late nineties. The whole Wen HO Lee thing was of a piece with the Cox hearings that as far as I could tell produced a much ballyhooed bunch of claptrap about Chinese spying that had virtually no substance.
Why it did not start from Austin further: You should remember that BushCo, even before entering office, had an agenda of expanding nuclear arms and normalizing the weapon.They also want to expand bogus missile defense, with Lockheed Martin a prime beneficiary. A piece of this set of goals was the bunker buster bomb, which fortunately was killed a couple of weeks back in Congress (you need a high yield thermonuclear weapon to do the job). Getting Lockheed-Martin and UT on board would serve a few roles. First, there almost certainly was some deal making with the highly politicized UT regents for some kind of kickback in the deal if it would have happened as originally envisioned. Second, while UT is no slouch in research, it has zero experience with this kind of enterprise and far less potential to raise trouble with a nuclear expansion agenda than UC.
I really think that (i) UC did a good job on the proposal, got an effective and charismatic new leader for the lab in Anastasio who had run Livermore, and was savvy to bring big Repub contractor Bechtel on board, (ii) other matters have put this down the priority list for BushCo (like saving their own necks in the wake of PlameGate and SnoopGate), and (iii) it is possible that Bush crony Gerald Parsky, a UC Regent, played a bigger role than we currently know.
Clearly, it sucked the wind out of Lockheed-Martin's sails--they were acting as if it were locked up.
There are still dangers ahead. As John Browne, former LANL director told the SF Chronicle, we are entering a new era. Los Alamos will switch from being ad hoc manufacturer of plutonium pits to full scale producer. That will become a big activity at the lab and will shift the emphasis from science. Still, when science plays a big role, it helps to protect us from idiotic decisions.
Livermore was always more dominated by the hawkish types like Teller and Lowell Wood willing to put ideology over science, and as a consequence has never had the scientific prestige you find at Los ALamos, nor a comparable record of scientific influence in the larger realm. Anastasio is a step away from the typical Livermore director, in that he seems to be a genuinely strong scientist himself and an effective manager (many past directors were weak on the science front). It will be interesting to see what happens.
December 22, 2005 11:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
My boss at UCSF who worked at the Joint Genome Institute at Livermore was always bad-mouthing Los Alamos and UC. But since he didn't know how to manage even a miniscule lab I knew it was all hot air. I think the bad press was part of Bush/Rove's agenda from back in 2001 as a quid pro quo to a group of contributors to boost UT's standing. Call me cynical --it wouldn't be the first time.
December 22, 2005 8:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
You can find plenty of LANL scientists who are disgusted with the UC bureaucracy, but not eager to switch to full blown corporate mode. They also can see how Sandia is run down the road in Albuquerque and generally prefer the LANL way. But many are furious at current UC administrators for picking Nanos,who was an umitigated disaster, as Browne's replacement. Still, I suspect Anastasio will be welcomed.
December 22, 2005 11:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
From my personal observation scientists are disgusted with any beureaucracy, UC or otherwise. I had to deal with it as a lab manager and found the people to be just doing their jobs as best they could and that if you followed the rules you wouldn't be bothered much. But there was always someone carping about how they were a bunch of morons who knew nothing about science who wee trying to waste their time and make their lives miserable. Hey life sucks -- deal with it -- everyone else has to. (not to you personally)
December 22, 2005 1:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
What sort of bad-mouthing? Your boss may not have been much of a manager, but there are all sorts of reasons to dis LANL, and a lot of the bad press was arguably deservable. Figure that as a PhD, your boss was comparing working at LANL to working at a (possibly tier 1) research university, and compare the quality of scholarship produced and range of fields studied. How many Nature and Science papers are produced by LANL versus, say, the UC system?
December 23, 2005 11:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm all for optimism but be careful about hopes for Bechtel's management in an R&D lab.
Having worked at the Idaho National Lab during the Lockheed and Bechtel regimes, they both brought experienced managment but each were lacking in ways that were significant in a national laboratory setting.
Bechtel will be fine managing production operations but unless they learned in Idaho (which I did not see much of) they are fairly clueless about R&D. They seemed to believe that the company's engineering experience prepared them for R&D. They had the idea that you could run R&D using a project managment approach, business is business. They found it hard to listen to people tell them that R&D, particulary R and early D, doesn't work to a timeline.
The culture clashes with university national lab managment and approaches, engineering management, and what I see as independent thinking and acting scientific professionals have the makings of a great story and a difficult process to live through.
December 22, 2005 9:03 PM | Reply | Permalink