Despite a string of security lapses and allegations of fraud and mismanagement, the University of California has been awarded the contract to continue managing the Los Alamos laboratory that built the atom bomb, the Energy Department said Wednesday.
Because of the scandals at Los Alamos, the government contract to run the nation's pre-eminent nuclear lab had been put out to bid this year for the first time in the lab's 63-year history.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced that a partnership of UC and the engineering giant Bechtel Corp. had prevailed over a rival team made up of the University of Texas and the defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
The contract is for $512 million over seven years, with a provision to extend it to 20 years.
"This is a new contract with a new team, marking a new approach to the management of Los Alamos. It is not a continuation of the previous contract," Bodman said at a news conference in Washington.
The university has run the lab since it was created in the New Mexico desert in 1943 as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the A-bomb. But because of bitter complaints in Congress about security lapses and poor management, the contract was put up for competitive bidding.
This time, the university teamed up with Bechtel to give itself more managerial expertise.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, with about 8,000 University of California employees and 3,000 contract workers, is one of the nation's three chief installations responsible for maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal and manufacturing weapons components.
The lab also conducts research on a host of topics of national interest, including miniaturized technology, genetics, computing, the environment and health.
In 1999, in a case that proved a major embarrassment for the government and the lab, Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was jailed amid an investigation into possible Chinese espionage. The case proved to be weak, and Lee pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information and was released with an apology from a federal judge.
The lab was rocked by other security lapses, as well as credit card abuses, theft of equipment and other instances of mismanagement.
Former lab investigator Glenn Walp, who was fired in 2002 after alleging mismanagement, fraud and cover-up at the lab, said he was disappointed that UC-Bechtel won.
"It's a blue Christmas for America," he said. Walp said UC deserves praise for the work it has done in the past, "but in the last 10 years, they're just incapable of running the lab that's so important to American security."
