Fred Tarantino

Bechtel's Man at the Nevada Site

June / July 2004 Volume 2 Number 3

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With 3,000 employees, Bechtel Nevada is one of Southern Nevada's largest nongaming employers. Bechtel Nevada, which manages the Nevada Test Site for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, is composed of three parent companies. They are Bechtel Corp., San Francisco, the world's largest privately owned engineering and construction company; Lockheed Martin, Bethesda, Md., an aerospace industry leader; and Johnson Controls, Milwaukee, an aerospace engineering and equipment management company. Overseeing Bechtel Nevada is Frederick Tarantino, president and general manager since August 2001. The interview was conducted by Richard Velotta and was published originally in Business Las Vegas and is reprinted with permission.

What is the dollar value of your contract with the government?

Last year we did about $460 million worth of work, and this year we'll do about a half-billion worth. And we'll have a half-billion dollars in annual revenue. On the high-tech side, we've got an awful lot of engineers and scientists. So in terms of being a Las Vegas high-tech employer, we certainly must be very substantial.

What is the process for the development of a project on the Test Site? Who makes the final decision for whether a project is undertaken at the site?

Our purpose out at the Test Site is really a vital national security purpose, to verify that the nuclear weapons stockpile is both safe and reliable and also in terms of counterterrorism training. So the marketplace we compete in, the defense marketplace, is really the high-end testing and evaluation marketplace or the high-end training marketplace and associated technologies with it. We market and we pursue prospects with government customers just like any other company, and, in the end, those determinations are made by the government customers.

Economic development leaders have tried to attract high-tech companies to the state. How can the Test Site be a part of the effort to bring more high-tech businesses to Nevada?

There's a standard way that this has been very successful in a number of localities where there's a standard triad between universities, federally funded programs and new high-tech industries. So we work very closely with UNLV's engineering departments and science departments. We love their graduates and we hire a bunch of them in our high-tech business. Then, the technologies that we work on and that we deploy and fuel for the federal government all have a relationship and all can be commercialized locally. That's really the way to do it, to get that triad working to push the high-tech business here.

The federal government has been criticized for establishing criteria that discourages small companies from bidding on contracts. What opportunities exist for small businesses and minority-owned businesses to win government contracts on the Test Site?

We've got a very aggressive approach for getting small businesses and minority businesses contracting. We've got very aggressive goals. In 2003, we awarded over $40 million in contracts to Nevada small businesses.

How has oversight of government activities changed in the post-9/11 era?

Well, 9/11 sure has changed our world. We're very much more security conscious than we used to be. We've got very good security at the Nevada Test Site. That's one of the things that actually make us very attractive to a lot of government customers. Our remoteness is a natural advantage in terms of security. We've got a highly trained, highly skilled work force in that area, both in terms of security and in terms of high-end testing and evaluation.

We've all heard a lot about how Homeland Security initiatives may be undertaken at the Test Site. What types of programs have been initiated or are in the works and how many jobs will be created in the process?

Last year we trained 5,000 first-responder at the Test Site. That involved them coming into town and staying at local hotels and being bused out for training purposes. I don't have any idea on how much that impacts the local market. But our largest growth there has been in homeland security.

So do you expect that growth to continue?

Yes. Staying ahead of terrorists is going to be a game of cat and mouse that we're going to be playing for the next several decades. It's just going to continue to be a very important national security issue.

Will Homeland Security initiatives be brought to the Hazardous Materials Spill Center in Area 5? Will the HazMat Spill Center be expanded because of additional concerns about terrorists dispersing harmful chemicals? How many jobs are associated with that area?

Absolutely. In fact, that's already going on. The expansion is ongoing. It's a terrific location. If you want to try to understand the ways to detect what terrorists are doing with hazardous chemicals, that might be very difficult to detect because only small amounts are released. You also can begin to understand what the consequences are and how people deal with and react to a possible terrorist attack.

Describe what happens at some of these training sessions.

We've got mockups of areas, like transportation centers or aircraft centers, where there's been an accident and it involves some sort of hazardous material or some sort of weapons of mass destruction. People do classroom training ahead of time and they organize into teams. There are people who are mock victims on the ground. Because it's a Test Site, we're able to have actual radioactive sources and actual hazardous chemicals out there, which just makes the training more realistic and more effective.

What's the status of the Atlas relocation program from Los Alamos to Area 6?
Please explain the purpose of the pulsed-power experiments of that project.

That is one of the most exciting things going on at the Test Site right now. The Test Site has always been the experimental area for the national laboratories for the most hazardous experiments, but they were usually done underground. What's really exciting going on now is we're seeing the laboratories starting to be positioned as above ground physics machines at the Test Site. Atlas is very important with respect to that. The Jasper gas gun is another one. Atlas is a pulse power physics machine. It's used to produce large pulses of electricity for isotropic compression experiments. It's reassembled, we're starting it up and it'll run its first experiment at the Test Site in the spring.

What will the machine do?

It takes large amounts of electricity stored in capacitors, they're discharged very quickly and they bring a large load of electricity into a central cavity where the experimental materials are. So if you want to test that material under very high pressures, the electrical pulse power is used to drive the very high pressures so we can better understand material behaviors.

It seems that these various projects are somewhat incompatible with each other and with the thriving tourism industry 100 miles away. How do you reconcile the proximity of projects involving nuclear waste, hazardous materials and rocket launchings so relatively close to what is arguably America's greatest tourist destination, Las Vegas?

We're really pretty far away, 60 miles to the northwest. That's a lot of desert between here and there that's really not developed. In fact, that remoteness is actually a natural advantage to us. It makes it that much easier for us. There aren't very many remote places like the Nevada Test Site any longer. Even though you happen to fly into the airport where there's a big tourist destination, you drive a long ways before you get there.

Let's talk a little about the future of the Test Site and Bechtel Nevada. Do you foresee any scenario in which some form of underground nuclear weapons testing would ever return to the Test Site?

I don't have a crystal ball. And I don't know whether or not there will ever be another underground test. I know that the United States of America is a very important country and that keeping it free and safe is very important because it's a beacon of hope for billions of people around the world. And I know that nuclear weapons are a deterrent and making sure they are reliable and safe is an extremely important part of keeping us free. And we're always going to need to be able to maintain the ability, if we need to, to make sure our weapons work or are safe. For that reason, the Nevada Test Site is always going to be here. Quite frankly, for that reason, we have a terrific future. It's never going to be closed. It's got a highly skilled work force that really is a national asset, and we've got a very bright future in front of us. conduct space testing for technologies like that.

How are you developing your work force for the future?

One of the things I'm really very proud of is what we're doing with people and particularly what we're doing to develop talent. We've got a leadership supply system we've put in place to reach down and identify our new hires, people in their 20s and 30s that haven't been around for a long time, make assessments of them and really run a process where we develop them for the future so that they can do these jobs at some point in time. This is an annual process where we take standard processes to assess people, identify whether people are future leaders, evaluate them by senior management, provide leadership development opportunities and then, a year later, we evaluate them. We've been turning the crank on this for two years. After four or five years, we're going to make a measurable, quantifiable improvement in the quality and talent of our work force. It's really quite exciting and it's in the forefront of what industry's doing today in human talent.

Do you believe the public will ever learn what really goes on at Area 51?

(Laughs) I wish I knew what happens at Area 51.