UC, U.S. to Negotiate on Running of Weapons Labs

University of California and U. S. Department of Energy officials are scheduled to meet next week to discuss disputes that may end the university’s half-century management of two national nuclear-weapons and energy-research laboratories.

Despite protests from faculty members who oppose UC’s involvement in weapons research, the university’s leaders say that they want to continue overseeing the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory if disagreements with the government about accident liability and other issues are settled.

The Department of Energy is insisting that UC and other Department of Energy facility managers start to assume at least partial financial liability for any toxic spills and other environmental damage originating at the labs. UC strongly opposes “any situation that puts the state taxpayers at risk,” said James Kane, a UC expert on lab affairs.

The contract with the Energy Department expires Sept. 30, 1992. UC regents have approved the start of negotiations for another five-year pact. The discussions have stalled in part because of the liability question.

As a result, U. S. Secretary of Energy James D. Watkins is thinking about opening the lab management contracts for the first time to competitive bidding, possibly involving private corporations or other universities serving as lab overseers, according to an Energy Department spokesman. UC President David P. Gardner insists that the university will not participate in bidding for the two weapons facilities.

“We have done this as a public service,” Ron Kolb, Gardner’s spokesman, said of UC’s management since World War II of Livermore in Northern California and Los Alamos in New Mexico. “It hasn’t benefited us in any tangible way and hasn’t resulted in a lot of positive public relations. We wouldn’t pursue it if they don’t ask us to do it any more.”

UC receives about $12.5 million a year in management fees to run the two labs, as well as the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, an Energy Department center near the UC Berkeley campus that does not perform weapons research. Kolb and other UC officials said the university would bid to keep the Lawrence Berkeley lab because it is so much a part of the school.

Ronald Brady, UC senior vice president for administration, is expected to lead a university delegation to Chicago for a meeting Monday and Tuesday with Energy Department officials. Kane, a special assistant to Gardner and a member of the negotiating team, said no decision about UC’s lab ties will be made by Tuesday, but added: “It’s an important meeting, you bet.”

John Belluardo, an Energy Department spokesman in Oakland, said the question of whether to extend the UC contract or put it out to bid is under review. He said such decisions in other cases usually were made before the last year of a contract, which would mean no later than September for UC.

UC’s Kane said he was optimistic that the Energy Department would extend the contract without bidding. He cited the example of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where the Energy Department recently renewed the contract with Princeton University after much scrutiny. “The fact that (the Energy Department) is looking at this with a lot of care does not surprise me,” said Kane, stressing that the Livermore and Los Alamos labs cost the government $2.1 billion a year to run.

The issue of accident liability is only one of the sticking points for contract renewal.

Also under discussion will be the department’s reported move to tighten control over security and information released by the labs. During the Persian Gulf War, the Energy Department reportedly tried to stop lab officials from talking to the press about such non-classified topics as the effect of Kuwait’s burning oil wells on global weather. The information was released, but not before relations were bruised.

If next week’s meeting fails, the result could be a victory for faculty members who want the contracts dropped for other reasons. Opponents of UC’s ties with the weapons labs contend that secret research is at odds with academic freedom and that the two labs, with their 16,000 employees, require too much attention from UC administrators.

BACKGROUND (Southland Edition, A18)

The University of California’s management of nuclear weapons and energy research labs for the government has long been controversial on UC campuses. But faculty opposition to such ties was never so strongly expressed as it was last year, when faculty senates at all nine UC campuses voted to urge the UC Regents not to renew the Livermore and Los Alamos lab contracts. The secret research and high amount of government direction at the labs are “contrary to the fundamental nature of the university,” a faculty report said. However, the regents and UC President David P. Gardner contend that the national interest is better served when a university, rather than a corporation, runs the labs. Those officials also say the easing of Cold War tensions may shift the labs’ work to more unclassified energy projects.