LANS to lose lab contract after poor performance

The National Nuclear Safety Administration has informed Congress that the Los Alamos National Laboratory contract will be put out for competitive bidding sometime after 2017. It will be only the second time the contact has been bid for competitively since the lab was created to develop the atomic bomb during World War II.

LANL’s most recent federal government performance evaluation was better than last year’s, but not good enough for the lab’s private-sector operator to earn the award of an extra year on its contract, the lab’s director informed LANL workers last week. LANS — a consortium including Bechtel and the University of California — needed to win a series of oneyear term extension awards to keep the contract going. By missing a term award for fiscal 2015, LANS’s window to meet that requirement closed.

LANL director Charles McMillan said in his email to lab employees that he was “deeply disappointed” that LANS didn’t get another year on the contract that runs through fiscal year 2017. But McMillan also said the feds have still offered LANS an extension of some kind to manage the lab. He didn’t explain, but a temporary extension would allow the Department of Energy more time to prepare specifications and choose the winner of a new contract.

The latest performance review calls for docking LANS $7.7 million in incentive fees, in part for a May incident at an electrical power substation that left one worker hospitalized for more than a month with severe burns and for potential contamination stemming from the handling of highly enriched uranium at a lab-run Nevada facility twice in 2014.