UC’s Contract to Run Nuclear Labs Extended to 2005

The U.S. Energy Department on Thursday extended its contract with the University of California to manage the nation’s two largest nuclear weapons labs through 2005, despite a series of embarrassing security lapses involving top-secret computer data.

Energy Department and university officials hurriedly signed the contract in the hallway, moments after it was approved by the UC Board of Regents.

The deal was signed less than 48 hours before Energy Secretary Bill Richardson will be bounced from office by the inauguration on Saturday of President-elect George W. Bush.

UC and Energy Department officials were worried that months of delicate contract talks would be tossed out with the Clinton administration.

Furthermore, congressional critics saw the change in administrations as a way to challenge the university’s historic role as manager of the weapons labs, which began at the dawn of the Nuclear Age.

“It got down to the wire,” said UC President Richard C. Atkinson. Although he believes that the university’s continued management has bipartisan support in Washington, he said any delay “would have complicated life at the laboratories.”

Richardson, meanwhile, issued a statement applauding the contract as “a tremendous achievement. . . . I think we’ve turned a corner in our management challenges and I’m very comfortable turning this over to a new administration.”

Under the terms of the new contract, which expires Sept. 30, 2005, the university will receive about $25 million a year to manage the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory about 40 miles east of Oakland.

The university will retain its authority to handle security at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories--with the advice of security consultants.

Energy Department officials initially wanted to strip security responsibilities from the university and hand them over to a subcontractor.

But Energy Department negotiators relented when UC officials argued persuasively that such an arrangement would be unworkable. University officials couldn’t figure out how an armed security guard could properly oversee physicists whose work is highly specialized.

In a concession by UC officials, the Energy Department now has the power to remove any of the 14,300 university employees from working at either the Los Alamos or Livermore labs.

Although the Energy Department cannot unilaterally fire any of these UC employees, it can force the university to reassign an employee to duties outside the lab--after a 60-day review by university management. This new rule covers all UC employees at the two labs, from janitors to tenured professors and top administrators.

Furthermore, the contract includes financial sanctions for any serious security breaches. UC could lose as much as $14.4 million this year and next, and $15.8 million a year, from 2003 to 2005.

Such fee reductions were insisted upon after the university came under fierce congressional criticism for two successive scandals involving potential losses of classified nuclear arms data.

In the first case, nuclear weapons scientist Wen Ho Lee was fired from Los Alamos in March 1999 amid a FBI investigation into alleged espionage. Eventually, Lee pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling nuclear data and prosecutors dropped 59 other unrelated counts of misappropriating weapons designs and other secret data.

Last June, the lab came under fire again after revelations that two computer hard drives, loaded with highly classified nuclear weapons data, had disappeared from a highly secure vault.

The missing hard drives were later found stashed behind a photocopier near the vault.

The University of California has managed Los Alamos since 1943, when physicist Robert Oppenheimer led a pack of UC scientists and engineers to build the first atomic bombs in the isolated desert of New Mexico. The Livermore lab opened shortly after the war.

The newly signed contract does not affect the Lawrence Berkeley lab, an energy research center in the hills above the Berkeley campus. The Berkeley lab’s contract, which expires in 2002, will be renegotiated separately.

“The laboratories,” Atkinson said, “were critical to the success of the nation during the Cold War and are going to be even more critical in the days ahead with threats of nuclear terrorism and biological warfare.”

The UC president said he believes “it has always been in the nation’s best interest to have these labs managed by the University of California. . . . We truly do it as a service to the country.”