INCENTIVE-COMPATIBLE RENT SEEKING? The University of Chicago retains its management agreement to operate Argonne National Laboratory for the Department of Energy.

A law enacted by Congress a few years ago calls for competitive bidding to determine the operators of national labs, and the university mounted a huge effort to maintain its historic role managing Argonne.

"We spent millions to compete," said Thomas Rosenbaum, University of Chicago research vice president.With more than 100 positions that are joint appointments at Argonne and the university, the two institutions are closely intertwined. University leaders said that their main concern was maintaining research synergies. The lab employs about 2,900, including about 1,000 scientists and engineers.

While expensive and harrowing for the university, the bidding process was valuable because it caused a review of Argonne's management that will result in improved operations, Rosenbaum said.

As an example, the number of days lost to accidents at Argonne must be low enough to rank the lab among the top 10 percent of safely operated research labs when compared to private industry, Rosenbaum said.

"We have to meet quite explicit performance targets," he said.Lab safety, especially concerning nuclear materials, has been a major concern at the Department of Energy. Argonne management was cited in March for lax security and safety that occurred over many years dating back to 1999. While calling the lapses serious, energy department officials said that no major injuries resulted.

Several other federal labs have been cited for safety lapses, and the federal law requiring competitive bidding was enacted in part because of problems at the government's nuclear weapons lab near Los Alamos, N.M.

Other nearby universities worked with Chicago, but the private sector stayed away.

In preparing its bid, the University of Chicago recruited Northwestern University and both University of Illinois campuses in Urbana-Champaign and Chicago to join Argonne's board of governors and scientific advisers. It also recruited BWX Technologies Inc., which has a long history of nuclear manufacturing work, as a subcontractor for nuclear operations at Argonne.

Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. was also hired by the University of Chicago to bring project management and safety expertise to Argonne's operation.

With all major research universities in the state behind a single bid and the relatively low annual management fees offered, the process failed to attract any contender from the private sector such as Bechtel and Lockheed Martin.

Disclaimer: I hold a renewable short-term appointment with Argonne as an energy and environmental policy scientist. A number of physicists at Northern Illinois use the Advanced Photon Source as a research tool.