WHO IS TRIAD NATIONAL LLC?

KEY PARTNERS Regents of the University of California System oversee 10 campuses, nearly 240,000 students, five medical centers and three national laboratories including Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It has overseen work with significant nuclear weapons projects at these facilities through World War II and the Cold War. But because of safety and security problems, the contracts for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore were put out to bid in 2005. UC has held on to the management of both labs since then, but now runs them in partnership with private companies.

Regents of the Texas A&M University System, Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s alma mater, have partnered with the University of California to help run Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 2007, also alongside Bechtel, BWXT, AECOM and Battelle. The university oversees 15 campuses in Texas and 152,000 students as well as several state agencies. It also houses one of three nuclear engineering departments in the United States and has two “research” nuclear reactors.

Battelle Memorial Institute is the world’s largest research institute, with a net revenue of $4.7 billion in 2015. In addition to Lawrence Livermore, Battelle oversees the management of work at six other large national laboratories, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Lab and the National Biodefense Analysis & Countermeasures Center. CORPORATE PARTNERS Fluor Federal Services, based in Richland, Wash., provides construction, engineering and procurement services. The company is part of the decontaminating and decommissioning work that is ongoing at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington as part of the CH2M Hill company, which was acquired by Jacobs Co. last year. Fluor has also worked on several other Energy Department environmental decontamination projects at

Robert Alvarez, who was a senior policy adviser to Bill Richardson when he served as secretary of energy in the Clinton administration, said the lack of a contingency plan points to holes in the Energy Department’s oversight system.

“One thing that really hasn’t changed much is the lack of safety culture at the lab,” Alvarez said. “It’s a culture that lacks what you’d call an industrial safety ethos.”

Since the Manhattan Project, the Department of Energy has been granted wide leeway to oversee its nuclear activity. Its contractors are largely indemnified from paying damages in the event of serious accidents and are not bound by the same rules as the private nuclear energy industry. The department’s primary tools to penalize violations are issuing fines and withholding bonus awards. If all else fails, it can terminate a lab operator’s contract, as it did with the current managers of Los Alamos.

“It is a low-risk environment, except when it comes to their reputation,” Alvarez said of the contractors. “And even that, they overcome and reformulate into a different consortium — but it is usually the same cast of characters.”

The new consortium will give Los Alamos the same primary managers as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Idaho National Laboratory, Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio, Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky and at the Depleted Uranium Hexaflouride Conversion Facilities.

Huntington Ingalls Industries, based in Newport News, Va., the largest shipbuilding company in the United States for both nuclear and non-nuclear ships, combined two subsidiaries to form Stoller Newport News in 2015. The company’s partners have a background in the nuclear power industry. Newport News Nuclear partnered with Los Alamos contractor BWXT to win the five-year, $1.4 billion environmental cleanup for Los Alamos National Laboratory, and took over management of Cold War-era nuclear waste and environmental decontamination this spring. Stoller Newport News Nuclear also is part of the contract at the Nevada National Security Site.

Longenecker & Associates isa woman-owned business based in Las Vegas, Nev., that provides technical and management services to environmental and nuclear industries. L&A is already providing support services to the environmental management contractors at Los Alamos, and holds contracts at the Nevada National Security Site and Sandia National Laboratories, and has partnerships with Savannah River Site, Y-12 National Security Complex, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and others.

Merrick & Co., founded in Denver, provides architecture, engineering, land surveying and building design services. It has worked on hydrothermal systems, gas pump design and renewable fuel technology. LOCAL PARTNERS TechSource is a science and engineer consultation firm based in Los Alamos, with expertise in fields of engineering.

Strategic Management Solutions, based in Albuquerque with offices in Los Alamos and other New Mexico locations, specializes in environmental health and safety and quality assurances, with a range of services that include decommissioning contaminated buildings, security services, information technology services and engineering support.

in California, seen as its rival. UC, Texas A&M and Battelle have run Lawrence Livermore for the last decade.

The main loser in Friday’s decision is Bechtel, which had submitted a contract bid under a team it formed with Purdue University.

A third bidder was the University of Texas and Boeing. A fourth team, first reported by the trade publication Exchange Monitor, included BWXT, Jacobs and Southeastern Universities Research Association.

Terry Wallace, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a statement that the lab is committed to working with the new management team.

“While the contract change will bring in a new team of parent companies, the laboratory’s mission remains the same: to serve the nation in the tradition of excellence that has defined Los Alamos for the last 75 years,” he said.

Alvarez said the only tool left to enforce better safety than in the past would be congressional oversight and withholding funds.

But, Alvarez said, “there has been no serious congressional oversight for several years.”