NORTHROP WANTS LOS ALAMOS CASH

A sec­ond giant defense con­trac­tor is get­ting into the race to run the world’s lead­ing nuclear lab.
In a press release that just landed in my in-​​box, Northrop Grumman has announced that it will “lever­age its exper­tise in advanced tech­nol­ogy and large-​​scale pro­gram man­age­ment to bid on the con­tract to man­age Los Alamos National Laboratory.“
Two weeks ago, Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense con­trac­tor, made a sim­i­lar announce­ment. But there are key dif­fer­ences between the two firms. Lockheed already has a bunch of expe­ri­ence run­ning this kind of research cen­ter. The com­pany has been oper­at­ing Sandia National Laboratories for years — and plucked Sandia chief Paul Robinson to head up its Los Alamos bid. Northrop says it is “assem­bling a world-​​class team of part­ners from the aca­d­e­mic and busi­ness com­mu­ni­ties who offer par­tic­u­lar exper­tise in areas such as sci­en­tific research.” But it doesn’t have the same track record as Lockheed.
Still, a bid from another defense indus­try heavy­weight can’t be good news for the University of California (UC), which has run Los Alamos for the Energy Department since the Oppenheimer era. Not long ago, it looked like UC would be the only bid­der on the $2.2 bil­lion per year con­tract — despite a decade-​​long series of scan­dals at the lab. But the Energy Department upped the Los Alamos man­age­ment fee by 500 per­cent. Companies can now turn a nice $73 mil­lion profit from run­ning the lab. And after 60 years of hav­ing the waters to them­selves, UC sud­denly finds itself sur­rounded by sharks.

April 25th, 2005 | Los Alamos and Labs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.