Washington

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are facing an uncertain future after the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it will accept bids from new contractors to run the lab. For the whole of its 60-year history, the nuclear-weapons laboratory has been managed by the University of California.

Scientists credit the university with fostering an atmosphere of academic rigour and intellectual openness that they fear could disappear under management by a corporation or other institution. “There's great concern that the intellectual capability of this lab could just dissolve,” says William Priedhorsky, chief scientist in Los Alamos' nonproliferation division.

The DOE says that its decision, announced on 30 April, is a response to recent fraud cases involving lab employees, and to inventory audits that highlighted missing or misplaced equipment (see Nature 421, 99–100; 2003). “The problems at the lab represent a systemic management failure,” Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration — the DOE agency that oversees the lab — told a congressional committee. The department will seek competitive bids to run the lab from September 2005, when the university's existing contract expires.

But some observers charge that the decision is driven in part by the Bush administration's desire to make trouble for Gray Davis, the Democrat governor of California. Organizations close to the administration, including the University of Texas and the engineering firm Bechtel, are thought to be top candidates for running the lab. “This is ultimately a political decision,” says one scientist working at the laboratory. “This administration doesn't have much love for the state of California.”

Management issues at Los Alamos have also raised the ire of Congress, which has been growing impatient with the lab since Wen Ho Lee, a mechanical engineer there, was accused of passing weapons secrets to a foreign power in 1999. And now even the lab's most ardent congressional supporters, such as Senator Pete Domenici (Republican, New Mexico), are conceding that other institutions should be allowed to compete for the management contract.

Richard Atkinson, the University of California's president, says that he is unsure whether the university will compete for the contract. But he adds that if it does, it will be without fanfare or the millions of dollars usually expended to win such a role.

Los Alamos officials say that they have already begun to feel the effects of the DOE's decision. Retirement applications have almost doubled compared with the same time last year, and recruitment is also being adversely affected. “It's foolish to throw away a contractor that is one of the best publicly run universities in the world,” says Albert Migliori, a physicist and 30-year veteran of the laboratory.