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One of two consortia bidding to manage the troubled Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, withdrew its bid this week, leaving the Department of Energy (DoE) struggling to convince Congress that the contract will still be properly contested.

The State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook and Battelle, a private research organization based in Columbus, Ohio, are now well-placed to win the $400 million-a-year contract.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) of Troy, New York, withdrew its planned bid hours before the deadline expired on Monday, angering Westinghouse, its partner in the bid, and leaving the DoE with little room for manoeuvre in its urgent search for a new contractor to run Brookhaven. Federico Peña, the energy secretary, fired the old contractor, Associated Universities Inc., in May.

The department said on Monday that it would postpone the deadline to September 22. Westinghouse is expected to submit a bid with a new partner, Illinois Institute of Technology.

Brookhaven has been in turmoil since the discovery in January of a small leak of tritium from a storage tank holding spent fuel from the High Flux Beam Reactor (HFBR), one of the laboratory's main research facilities and an important neutron source for US scientists (See Nature 388, 503; 1997). The crisis deepened last week, when Michael Forbes (Republican, New York), the local congressman, and Senator Alfonse D'Amato (Republican, New York), called for the immediate closure and decommissioning of the 30MW reactor.

In a July 17 letter to George Brown (Democrat, California), the senior Democrat on the Science Committee in the House of Representatives, Peña promised to rethink his approach if competition was not achieved for the Brookhaven contract.

Some congressional leaders had already expressed concern that Peña's decision to restrict bids to non-profit organizations would result in limited competition for the contract. The DoE believes that a non-profit body, such as a university, will support basic science at Brookhaven better than a commercial contractor would — a view shared by many Brookhaven scientists. But it did allow commercial contractors, such as Westinghouse, to act as partners in bids led by non-profit organizations.

It is not clear if RPI's sudden withdrawal was influenced by last week's statement from D'Amato and Forbes, which revealed just how serious the problems facing the new contractor are going to be.

Most government laboratories in the United States rely on the unstinting support of their local political representatives, without which they are unlikely to win battles with other laboratories for programmatic funding. It is almost inconceivable, for example, that the Department of Energy would try to get money to restart HFBR if D'Amato and Forbes continue to oppose this.

Nancy Connell, a spokesperson for RPI, says that it decided not to bid on Saturday, and informed Westinghouse on that day. “We had to reach a determination as to whether winning the contract would positively impact our mission as a university,” she says. “We decided that it would not”. She denies that the statements from D'Amato and Forbes played a part in the decision.

Peña met D'Amato and Forbes on Friday. He told them that the DoE would not accede to their demand that the reactor be closed immediately, but instead proceed with its plan to consult with scientists and the Long Island community before making a decision early next year (see Nature 388, 503; 1997).

The statement from D'Amato and Forbes infuriated staff at Brookhaven, several hundred of whom protested outside Forbes' local headquarters last week. In July, Forbes told staff that he hoped research would resume at the HFBR. There is “a sense of outrage and betrayal” at the laboratory over Forbes' new position, one employee said.