[NukeNet] GREEN bid in the news again today - ABC/LATimes/CBS

[Marylia Kelley]

Hi, here are three media featuring Tri-Valley CAREs' and the "GREEN BID"
team's response to DOE's announcement that it is awarding the Livermore Lab
management contract to the UC-Bechtel consortium.

The three are: ABC news (including a live link to the program), the Los
Angeles Times and CBS/Bay City News.

Following the three is a copy of the press release. Additional news
coverage has included the Business Times, Daily Californian and an
invitation to appear on tomorrow's Forum (KQED, with Michael Krasney),
among others.

As you will see, the stories continue to carry the central theme of our
"green bid" for Livermore Lab.

Read on...

1. From abc7news:
The link below is to web text and a live link of the ABC News show with
Willie Monroe interviewing Tri-Valley CAREs' executive director, Marylia
Kelley, on the group's response to the awarding of the Livermore Lab
management contract to the UC-Bechtel consortium.

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=local&id=5286159

2. From LA Times, Ralph Vartabedian on management contract, including
Tri-Valley CAREs' perspective and green bid.

Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-livermore9may09,1,145258
1.story?coll=la-news-a_section


  Consortium wins contract to run Livermore lab

The partnership, which is given a seven-year deal, includes the UC
system, which has long run the facility.
By Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writer

May 9, 2007

The Energy Department on Tuesday awarded a seven-year contract to
operate Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to an industry consortium
that includes the University of California, which has run the lab since
it opened in 1952.

This year the lab was selected by the Energy Department to design and
develop a new generation of nuclear bombs, known as the reliable
replacement warhead. A report by an independent group of scientists
warned that the project faced serious technical challenges.

The management consortium, Lawrence Livermore National Security LLC, was
selected to run the Livermore lab over a competing group led by Los
Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp. Energy Department officials said
the consortium submitted a superior proposal and a lower bid.

Under the new contract, the team, which includes Bechtel National Inc.,
BWX Technologies Inc. and Washington Group International Inc., would
receive $297.5 million over the seven-year contract. The consortium also
includes Battelle Memorial Institute, Texas A&M University and several
small businesses.

The University of California's contract to operate Livermore was put up
for bid after Congress grew concerned about the management of another
facility, Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has been shaken by a
series of security and safety lapses over the last decade. The Livermore
lab escaped much of the criticism but was included in the requirement
for a contract competition.

The consortium is nearly identical to the group that took over Los
Alamos, though the relative shares that each member has in the
corporation is different. At Livermore, the University of California
controls half of the six-member board, said Gerald L. Parsky, chairman
of the consortium's board.

Another bid was submitted by a group calling itself Green LLC, which
consisted of two nuclear watchdog groups, Tri-Valley Communities Against
a Radioactive Environment and Nuclear Watch of New Mexico. Energy
Department officials said Green's proposal to transform the lab into a
"center for civilian science" was not responsive to the government's
request.

Meanwhile, three students and alumni at UC campuses in Santa Barbara,
Santa Cruz and Berkeley went on hunger strikes this week to protest the
involvement of the university system in designing nuclear weapons.

Energy Department officials dismissed their demands.

"We urge students participating in this action to cease the strike and
to eat," said Chris Harrington, a UC spokesman.

/ralph.vartabedian at latimes.com


3. CBS 5 Television, Bay City News Service on the contract and Tri-Valley
CAREs' response.

LIVERMORE: UC MAINTAINS MANAGEMENT CONTRACT AT LAWRENCE LIVERMORE

/05/08/07 2:45 PDT/

LIVERMORE (BCN)

The University of California system will continue to manage the labs
that design and test the nation's nuclear weapons, something they have
done since the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Department of Energy
announced today.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced that a UC-led consortium, that
also includes Bechtel National, Inc., Texas A&M University and a number
of other private companies, has been awarded the seven-year contract to
manage the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The United States has
two other major nuclear weapons laboratories.

The same group won the contract to manage the Los Alamos National
Laboratory in 2005. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory management
contract was awarded solely to the university also in 2005.

"This is a great victory for the people of California and the University
of California. The decision to award the contract to manage and operate
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to the University of
California reaffirms the high standards of our public university system
and the high quality of the talented and insightful employees at our
research institutions,'' Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a statement.

Today's decision was criticized by an environmental group that had bid
on the management contract.

"It's DOE conducting business as usual,'' Marylia Kelley, one of the
leaders of the Livermore Lab GREEN, LLC team, said. "The network of
nuclear weapons 'good-old-boys' who have done so much damage to the
nation's budget, security and environment are in charge of both research
labs.''

Livermore Lab Green Renewable Energy and Environmental Nexus LLC was
composed of two anti-nuclear weapons groups, Tri-Valley CAREs and
Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, along with the New College of California,
and a private wind power company, WindMiller Energy.

The Livermore Lab GREEN, LLC management proposal would have transitioned
the lab from nuclear weapons development to unclassified civilian
science research within five years. They would have removed all
plutonium and highly enriched uranium from the lab within four years.
Their bid was eliminated from consideration by the Energy Department.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opened in 1952 and was managed,
along with Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories solely
by the university for their first half century. Following a series of
scandals involving mismanagement and security leaks, the Bush
administration opened up management contracts to competition.

UC and its partners could earn a maximum of $45.5 million annually in
management fees if the lab meets performance goals. The Energy
Department also has the ability to extend the contract for an additional
13 years depending on performance.

Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley are both named after Ernest O.
Lawrence, the first University of California Nobel Prize winner. He won
the physics prize in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron, one of the
earliest types of particle accelerators. He spent 30 years as a
professor at UC Berkeley before his 1958 death. In addition to the
laboratories, the Lawrence Hall of Science, and Lawrencium, element No.
103 on the periodic table, are named after him.

Lawrence was a key figure in the Manhattan Project, the United States'
development of the atomic bomb in World War II. He is credited with
developing the process used to separate the uranium that was used in the
first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Lawrence also
recruited J. Robert Oppenheimer, another UC Berkeley physicist, to work
on the development of the atomic bomb in the early 1940s. Oppenheimer
would eventually lead the effort at Los Alamos, N.M. that developed both
the uranium bomb dropped over Hiroshima, Japan and the plutonium bomb
dropped over Nagasaki, Japan in August 1945.

4. Press release

for more information
Marylia Kelley, Tri-Valley CAREs, (925) 443-7148
Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, (505) 989-7342

for immediate release, May 8, 2007
Livermore Lab "Green Bid" Team Decries Dept. of Energy Contract Award,
Cites Missed Opportunity to Move Livermore From H-bombs to "World Class
Center for Civilian Science"

The decision to award management of the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (LLNL) to the University of California and Bechtel, the same
consortium recently selected to manage the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab,
demonstrates the failure of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to conduct
a fair and open, competitive bidding process, according to groups that
sought to transform LLNL into a premier environmental research facility.

"It's DOE conducting business as usual," said Marylia Kelley, executive
director of the Livermore-based Tri-Valley CAREs and one of the leaders of
the Livermore Lab GREEN, LLC team. "The network of nuclear weapons
'good-old-boys' who have done so much damage to the nation's budget,
security and environment are in charge of both research labs."

"The DOE missed a key opportunity to take Livermore Lab in a new
direction," Kelley added. "Our management proposal would have promoted
world class science by transforming Livermore Lab from a nuclear weapons
design facility into a center for civilian science."

She continued, "By focusing on socially-beneficial scientific initiatives
like sustainable energy, global warming and environmental cleanup
technologies, DOE could have increased cutting-edge research at the
Livermore Lab while providing more security and safety for its employees.
Instead, DOE has demonstrated its lack of vision. We are disappointed, but
not surprised"

Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico and one of
the partners in the GREEN, LLC bid, added, "Bechtel, whose bottom line is
profit, is now in the business of designing at Livermore Lab and producing
at Los Alamos Lab the first new U.S. nuclear weapons in 20 years.
Apparently Bechtel and its partners expect business to boom, at the expense
of the American taxpayer and global security."

"This is essentially the same consortium, with the University of California
and Bechtel at the helm, that has taken a bad management situation at Los
Alamos and made it much worse," Coghlan continued.

"If the Los Alamos Lab contract is indeed the harbinger for Livermore, I
fear for the future of the employees and our community," stated Kelley.

"In contrast, our management plan contained specific health and safety and
whistleblower protections for employees," she added.

The Livermore Lab GREEN, LLC management proposal would have transitioned
Livermore Lab from nuclear weapons development to an unclassified "World
Class Center for Civilian Science" within 5 years. Plutonium and highly
enriched uranium would have been removed in 4 years.

The GREEN, LLC bid was arbitrarily eliminated from consideration by DOE
earlier in the process.

The Livermore Lab GREEN (Green Renewable Energy and Environmental Nexus),
LLC consisted of two nuclear "watchdog" organizations, Tri-Valley CAREs and
Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, partnered with an academic institution, New
College of California, and a green energy company, WindMiller Energy.

A copy of the Livermore Lab GREEN, LLC bid and follow up documents,
including the team's protest of DOE's "biased" rejection of the green bid,
are available on the web at www.trivalleycares.org.

####

Marylia Kelley,
Executive Director

Tri-Valley CAREs
2582 Old First Street
Livermore, CA  94551

Ph: (925) 443-7148
Fx: (925) 443-0177
Web: www.trivalleycares.org
Email: marylia at trivalleycares.org or marylia at earthlink.net