CH2M Hill, the Englewood engineering and environmental company that helped dismantle and clean up the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, is now in a runoff to manage the birthplace of the atomic age, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
More than a dozen defense and engineering contractors and universities jockeyed for a shot at running the $2.2 billion-a-year laboratory, which had been beset with a series of high- profile lapses in security, safety and financial control.
The competition has boiled down to two consortiums – one led by the University of California, which has directed the lab since 1943, and the second led by Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor. CH2M is part of the Lockheed team.
CH2M’s experience in cleaning up Rocky Flats south of Boulder may give the Lockheed consortium a leg up in running Los Alamos.
Rocky Flats made plutonium fission cores, or pits, until 1989. When detonated by high explosives, they provide the atomic fire to ignite all thermonuclear weapons.
Los Alamos inherited the controversial job of making pits, albeit just a few each year, while the government considers building a larger factory. Plans for that factory have stalled, and each of the teams competing for the Los Alamos management contract now will be judged on the ability to ramp up pit production, if requested by the federal government.
CH2M Hill hired several former Rocky Flats pit-makers and now has what is believed to be the nation’s only pit-making expertise in the private sector.
“They put a team together that numbers above 20 people, figuring that someday the United States is going to need pit manufacturing again, and they wanted to be ready,” said C. Paul Robinson, physicist and former Sandia National Laboratories director. Robinson heads the Lockheed team.
Lockheed plans to meld CH2M’s talent with methods used at Sandia, which it operates, to design weapons components, partly for manufacturing ease and reduced cost.
“Instead of throwing a design over the transom to the production plant, the folks doing the design will actually fabricate the device … and look at what changes will be necessary to help manufacture it,” Robinson said.
Replacement pits are needed every year when old pits are removed from the nuclear arsenal for routine examination and experiments to spot signs of aging.
Key lawmakers in Congress are prodding the Bush administration toward redesigning nuclear weapons to resist aging and to make them cheaper and easier to maintain.
Making pits for what Congress has called the Reliable Replacement Warhead program could become part of Los Ala mos’ mission if a larger factory is not built soon.
But first, Robinson said, the nation needs a wide-ranging debate on the role of nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War era. That debate would point to what kinds of weapons the nation needs, he said.
But University of California officials, who have paired with Bechtel National and two nuclear firms in their bid to run Los Alamos, recently suggested that only academia has the scientific rigor and “moral strength” to watch over the aging nuclear explosives in the U.S. arsenal.
Academics can objectively judge, for example, whether a return to nuclear testing is necessary, they said.
A defense firm, they suggested, might not encourage enough scientific depth to answer those questions or might skew the answers in the interest of profits.
Robinson vigorously denied that corporations such as Lockheed lack the ability or integrity to do real science.
Robinson also said his team was appalled at the lack of competent business practices and focused scientific direction at Los Alamos under the university’s direction.
“No wonder science is hurting. You’ve got scientists with no support for their work,” Robinson said. “We think Sandia is a good proof test that good processes are not incompatible with good science. We know how to bring processes into being that can streamline and simplify things for scientists.”
The Lockheed consortium also includes the University of Texas and Fluor Corp., another nuclear operations company.
Robinson said the idea of managing science is a bit of a misnomer. Paraphrasing a friend, physicist Murray Gell- Mann, he said, “the best scientific innovations happen at this boundary between order and chaos.”
“You don’t tread too far into order or you won’t have science. You also don’t want to drift out into incoherence, and I wonder if over the last five or 10 years if that hasn’t been the case at Los Alamos,” Robinson said.
National lab executives should set broad research agendas that don’t compete with universities but draw upon the labs’ strengths in having multiple disciplines working under one outfit, he said.
The Oakland Tribune is a member of the ap News Service.
