The University of California will continue to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory for at least the next seven years, this time leading a public-private consortium that includes three corporate partners, the U.S. Energy Department has announced.

UC, which has run Los Alamos for more than 60 years, will be joined by Bechtel National Inc., BWX Technologies, and the Washington Group International. Together, the public-private consortium will be known as Los Alamos National Security LLC. The new director of the national weapons lab will be Michael Anastasio, who is currently director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"I cannot stress enough that this is a new contract, with a new team, marking a new approach to management at Los Alamos," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a Dec. 21 announcement. "It is not a continuation of the current contract."

UC President Robert Dynes said he has confidence "in the men and woman who serve our nation at Los Alamos, and I know that they will continue to chart new frontiers and help solve some of the greatest scientific and technological problems of our time."

The UC has managed Los Alamos since its founding, in 1943, by UC physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, as a secret weapons laboratory in the Manhattan Project, and the university had never before had to compete for the contract.

Even after the Energy Department announced that it would take bids for the lab contract, it appeared that UC would be the only university contending for the contract. The University of Texas and Texas A&M systems, which had expressed early interest, withdrew from contention last winter, following an announcement by the Lockheed Martin Corp. that it would not compete.

To entice more corporations to enter the race, the Energy Department offered to raise the annual management fee by a factor of nine, to as much as $79 million. Lockheed Martin later re-entered the competition in the spring, with the University of Texas as a partner.