Embattled Lab Director Leaves as Bid Draws Near

After seeing the Los Alamos National Laboratory through two of the toughest and most heavily criticized years in its history, Director G. Peter Nanos announced Friday he will leave the lab for the U.S. Department of Defense.

His departure leaves UC without a seasoned Los Alamos director months before the university is set to fight to hold onto the lab's contract, which expires Sept. 30.

Robert Kuckuck, who spent 35 years at the UC-run Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and several years at the National Nuclear Security Administration, will serve as the lab's interim director until the contract ends. He will take his post May 16.

But as UC prepares to prove that it has the management ability to continue its 62-year stewardship of the lab, it is unclear how the university will fare with a new lab director. Lab and university officials would not comment on how the personnel change will affect a potential bid.

Nanos, who took over the lab in January 2003, served the shortest-and arguably most troubled-tenure in the lab's history. His run began months before the Department of Energy put the lab up for national competition after reports of security, safety and financial mishaps. Just a year later, he implemented a seven-month shutdown of all laboratory operations.

He found himself at the center of a storm of criticism in recent months for his decision to shut down the lab and for what employees called a ruthless management style.

In July, when Nanos shut down the lab after two classified storage devices went missing, he said lab employees had fallen into a "cowboy culture" in which they willfully broke lab rules.

"The standards of this institution are clear: We will not tolerate this behavior," Nanos said at a July UC Regents meeting. "If you can't protect classified information, you can't work at Los Alamos. It's very simple."

Nanos' comments did not sit well with some of the lab's 14,000 employees, especially when lab officials later discovered that the disks never existed and were reported lost because of a clerical error.

Many of lab's employees, who include some of the nation's most premier scientists, also resented being forced to leave their work for security drills and training sessions.

In January, one disgruntled lab employee launched "LANL:

The Real Story" (http://lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com) a Web log to chronicle employee frustrations. Since its debut, it has drawn more than 150,000 visits and thousands of posts denouncing Nanos' leadership style.

"He chose to transfer blame and intimidate individuals even with a staff that was often attempting to implement difficult and complex safety processes with inadequate institutional support and limited resources," wrote Thomas Meyer, a chemist who served as the lab's associate director for strategic research under Nanos. Meyer resigned during the shutdown in October 2003 and wrote an eight-page critique blasting the director's style.

"The director must ultimately face blame for the negative consequences of his actions," Meyer wrote.

But neither Nanos, the university nor the lab would say whether the heavy criticism and media frenzy surrounding the Web log was a factor in his decision to leave.

"I believe it is now time for my path and the laboratory's path to diverge," Nanos said in a letter to all lab employees. "In the coming months as the competition to run the laboratory comes to a conclusion, I am very confident that the university will win based on the foundation you have laid."

Now that Nanos is leaving the lab, many of the Web log's participants are celebrating his departure and even taking credit for his departure.

"The corks are a poppin' tonight!" read one anonymous comment on the Web log. "It's gonna sound like the 4th of July in Los Alamos county tonight!"

Although UC has yet to publicly announce whether it will enter a bid, Kuckuck is widely expected to have to position the lab as the competition's front-runner.

Another anonymous comment read, "Your biggest challenge, Dr. Kuckuck, is to begin to return LANL to a place where people can make decisions they have to make and know that their management will back them up, not attack them in front of Congress."

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