Not long after locals did the same, all members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation said this week they have concerns about the Energy Department’s plan for the next national laboratory contract in northern New Mexico.
In a list of six concerns over the next decade-spanning management and operations contract at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), lawmakers urged DoE to “protect the jobs of the existing workforce” at the plutonium-production lab, and provide the eventual contractor with “flexibility and incentives to establish competitive compensation and benefits packages that strengthen workforce recruitment and retention.”
All three of New Mexico’s U.S. representatives and both of its U.S. senators laid out their concerns in a letter dated Aug. 10 and written on congressional stationery to Frank Klotz, administrator of DoE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The letter arrived about two weeks after the Los Alamos County government wrote DoE to complain that the draft request for proposals the agency released in June capped contractor fees at such a low level that the most technically capable companies might choose to forgo the expense and effort of bidding on the contract at all.
Los Alamos National Security (LANS), a conglomerate of Bechtel, the University of California, AECOM [ACM], and BWX Technologies [BWXT], has run LANL since 2006 under a contract worth roughly $2 billion a year. The pact is set to expire on Sept. 30, 2018. The Energy Department curtailed LANS’ contract after a 2014 underground radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., was traced to an improperly packaged container of radioactive waste from the laboratory.
In a draft solicitation for a successor management and operations contract, DoE said the proposed fixed fee for lab management cannot exceed 1 percent of the estimated cost, and the proposed award fee cannot exceed 0.5 percent of the cost for each contract period. The planned contract consists of a five-year base period with five one-year options.
LANL employees roughly 11,200 personnel, including more than 7,000 contractors.