DOE to pare some costs - and sell some labs.

On Monday, President Clinton issued a "decision directive" ordering the Department of Energy to rein in costs and redundancies at its 27 national laboratories. But he also firmly rejected one cost-cutting suggestion tendered earlier this year by an independent task force reviewing the labs: a 5-year transfer of Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National Laboratory's defense activities to DOE's other two multipurpose, nuclear weapons laboratories.

That move would probably have tolled the death knell for the 43-year-old Livermore facility. Though nearly 75 percent of its work now involves nondefense activities--from climate change studies and biotechnology to medicine--Livermore derives almost 60 percent of its roughly $1.1 billion annual budget from programs aimed at maintaining the health of U.S. nuclear weapons. Much of the facility's nondefense activities, therefore, rely on the supercomputers, lasers, and other resources initially acquired for defense work, explains laboratory spokesman David Schwoegler.

"The President has determined that the continued vitality of all three DOE nuclear weapons laboratories will be essential"--especially if the United States hopes to forswear nuclear testing for the next few years, Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary said Monday at a press conference in Washington, D.C. Clinton announced the "zero yield" comprehensive test ban policy on Aug. 11.

Key to ensuring the reliability of the U.S. weapons stockpile in the absence of testing is a new "science-based stockpile stewardship" program. It aims not only to provide surveillance for all elements of the weapons, but also "to understand the way nuclear weapons grow old and to replace parts as required," explains Everett Beckner, DOE's principal deputy assistant secretary for defense.

Livermore and the other two DOE defense centers--Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory--each plan to tackle different parts of the stewardship activities.

O'Leary says it doesn't seem very cost-effective to put a U.S. test ban "at risk by simply folding up a lab [Livermore]." But she acknowledges that administrative activities have bloated DOE's laboratory budgets.

By the end of next month, her agency hopes to announce details of how it plans to cut $1.6 billion from the labs' spending over the next 5 years--or some 13 to 18 percent, after accounting for inflation.

Moreover, O'Leary notes, "there are willing purchasers" for some of the agency's smaller, single-purpose laboratories. By next spring, she says, DOE will probably have negotiated the sale of at least two.