TEAM: University of California/Texas A&M
The UC System has been part of LANL since its beginning. UC oversees 10 campuses, nearly 240,000 students, five medical centers and three national laboratories, including a partnership at LANL, and at LLNL and LBNL in northern California.
The Texas A&M University System, Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s alma mater, has partnered with UC to help run LLNL since 2007. Its other team members there include private companies Bechtel, BWXT, AECOM and Battelle. The university oversees 11 universities in Texas and 152,000 students as well as several state agencies. It also houses a top nuclear engineering department with two “research” nuclear reactors.
TEAM: Bechtel/Purdue University
Bechtel has co-managed LANL since 2006. It also has management contracts at LLNL, Y-12 in Tennessee, and the nuclear assembly plant, Pantex, in Amarillo, Texas. It also is constructing a massive radiation treatment facility at the Hanford site in Washington state, a project that has been plagued with setbacks, cost overruns and fines for falsifying the quality of nuclear materials. It previously held contracts at Idaho National Laboratory.
Purdue University, based in West Lafayette, Ind., is a research institute with several locations and polytechnic institutes throughout Indiana. The university has strategic research alliances with Sandia National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Ames, Argonne and Brookhaven national laboratories. Purdue also bid on the 2016 contract to manage Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, but lost to Honeywell.
TEAM: University of Texas System
The University of Texas System has 14 campuses and 234,000 students, many of whom focus on “cybersecurity, bioterrorism, policy and statecraft and other national security issues.” The university also has a nuclear and radiation engineering division. UT also bid for — and lost — when the LANL contract was on the table in 2005. It was an unsuccessful bidder for the Sandia contract in 2016. Texas does not have a known public partner, though experts believe one is likely to join.
NAMES TO KNOW
Battelle Memorial Institute
The world’s largest research institute, with a net revenue of $4.7 billion in 2015, Battelle is expected to be part of a bid team. Though it has not announced a partner, some believe it could join with the University of California and Texas A&M. The company is no stranger to the nuclear defense industry and currently helps manage LLNL with UC as a subcontractor. In addition to LLNL, Battelle oversees the management of work at six other large national laboratories, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Lab and the National Biodefense Analysis & Countermeasures Center.
Jacobs
Jacobs, a private engineering and construction company based in Dallas, also had a hand in a number of federal contracts, ranging from the national labs to nuclear submarine projects. The company currently helps oversee Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the Nevada National Security Site. It acquired CH2M last year, which has run waste cleanup projects in Washington state, Idaho and New York. Together, Bechtel and Jacobs also were granted contracts to manage environmental cleanup at several sites, beginning in the late 1990s, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Department of Energy sites in Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Ky.
Lockheed Martin
Until 2016, the defense and aeronautics company ran Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque for more than two decades and is one of the contractors that runs Y-12 and Pantex. It also vied for the Los Alamos contract in 2005. Based in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin maintains contracts with NASA, the Air Force, Army and Pentagon.
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