Washington DC

Los Alamos National Laboratory will be under fresh management from June. But staff wonder whether their new bosses will help the lab move on from the scandals that have dogged it in the past decade.

On 21 December, the US Department of Energy announced that the University of California would continue to run the New Mexico institution as part of a consortium that also includes three private companies. In a competition for the lab, it beat a partnership between the University of Texas and defence contractor Lockheed Martin. Los Alamos has been run by the University of California since it was set up to develop the atomic bomb during the Second World War.

The competition was the first in the lab's history, and was triggered by a series of security scandals, including charges of espionage, an industrial accident and reportedly missing computer disks that caused a three-month shutdown in 2004 (see Nature 433, 437; 2005).

In announcing the management change, energy department officials were quick to reassure employees who are tired of the recurrent problems. “I cannot stress enough that this is a new contract, with a new team, marking a new approach at Los Alamos,” said Samuel Bodman, the US energy secretary.

Along with the University of California, the consortium — called Los Alamos National Security LLC — consists of Bechtel, BWX Technologies and Washington Group International, which are all nuclear-facilities contractors. Some employees think that it will therefore concentrate on nuclear weapons at the expense of basic science. “There is a lot of concern that Los Alamos would become nothing more than a plutonium factory,” says Doug Roberts, who recently retired from Los Alamos and runs a widely read blog about the lab.

Michael Anastasio, the lab's new director, has tried to allay such concerns. “This is not a de-emphasis on science,” says Anastasio, currently director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Under the new set-up, the university is expected to run science operations, while the other partners take care of administrative matters, including security.