Watchdog pushes for labs’ eval data
Info on Sandia, LANL was expected in Jan.
ANew Mexico advocacy group is making a renewed push for release of delayed 2015 federal performance evaluations for the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico has filed a second request under the Freedom of Information Act for the evaluation reports, this time calling for “expedited processing” for the documents that Nuke Watch maintains is required by law.
The performance evaluations by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Safety Administration are typically released in January following the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year under review. For 2015, NNSA so far has posted none of the performance evaluation (PER) reports for any of the sites that are part of the nation’s nuclear weapons complex.
An NNSA spokeswoman initially said the reports were expected to be released in mid-January, but since has said the evaluation process continues. NNSA’s Francie Israeli reiterated by email Thursday, “I don’t have any new information on the release of the PERs. Once the process has been completed, we will publish the evaluations.”
Nuke Watch’s new request cites part of the federal open records
law that said agencies should provide a quick response to records requests if “a compelling need exists when failure to obtain records expeditiously could reasonably be expected to pose a threat to the life or physical safety of an individual or, when a request is submitted by a person primarily engaged in disseminating information and there is an urgency to inform the public about actual or alleged Federal Government activity.”
Nuke Watch says that there is “great public interest in the NNSA’s Contractor Performance Evaluation Reports for many NNSA Facilities, but particularly in those reports for the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories.”
The letter from the watchdog group’s Jay Coghlan and Scott Kovac cites a recent Journal editorial that said, “Either the National Nuclear Security Administration is running really late in completing performance evaluations of national weapons contractors or it is stonewalling in releasing them. Neither possibility is good.” The Journal also has submitted a FOIA request for the evaluations.
Nuke Watch notes that, in 2012, after release of PERs was denied, it filed a lawsuit. The evaluations were released six days later and have since been posted annually. The latest request says that, under FOIA, the reports must be posted online in the NNSA’s “Electronic Reading Room” because the evaluations are “frequently requested records.”
Also still to be released are the 2015 “fee determination” letters for NNSA weapons complex contractors, which set out how much of a performance-based fee the contractors get on top of their contract amounts. For instance, the Los Alamos contract for Los Alamos National Security LLC — a Bechtel-led consortium that includes the University of California — totals more than $2 billion a year, but LANS can get many millions of dollars more for meeting performance goals.
Some details of the LANS 2015 evaluation have come out. LANL director Charles McMillan, in a message to employees in December, said that, in order to earn another contract year, the lab had to score better than “satisfactory” in all six evaluation categories. “We did not accomplish this,” McMillan said, despite getting high scores in four of the six areas. That failure means the DOE will rebid the Los Alamos operating compact some time in the next couple of years.
The Journal has learned that, among the problems that contributed to LANS not meeting its threshold for a contract extension was an electrical fire in which a Los Alamos lab worker suffered severe burns and incidents at a Nevada nuclear site run by LANL in which workers were exposed to potential contamination.
After a poor FY 2014 evaluation stemming from a radioactive leak from a waste drum packed at Los Alamos that has shut down the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, the federal government cut the fee for LANS by nearly 90 percent to $6.25 million for fiscal 2014. That compared with $59 million-plus paid to the LANS consortium the previous two years.