NATIONAL LABS S ix months of uncertainty at Brookhaven National Laboratory ended last week, when Department of Energy (DOE) managers chose a new contractor to operate the troubled facility in Upton, New York. The winning team, which takes over in January, is made up of the State University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook, and Battelle Memorial Institute. It now faces the challenge of mending fences with the lab's neighbors and resolving the fate of a major research reactor that local groups and New York politicians want to close. The new director, former Stony Brook President John Marburger, promises to make major changes to clean up environmental problems and ease the concerns of the surrounding Long Island population. Job one is to establish contact with our community, he said on 25 November. He also pledged to make major reassignments within the 3200-member staff to ensure that Brookhaven abides by environmental regulations while producing quality science. Marburger, a physicist, is a former chair of Universities Research Association Inc., a consortium that operates DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the country's most powerful accelerator. DOE Secretary Federico Pea fired Brookhaven's current contractor, Associated Universities Inc. (AUI), in May, following revelations of a long-standing tritium leak at the High-Flux Beam Reactor (HFBR), which is shut down for repairs ( Science , 9 May, p. 890). In the competition that followed, the Stony Brook- and Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle beat out another group led by Westinghouse and IIT Research Institute of Chicago for the 2 billion, 5-year contract to operate the 400-million-a-year lab. The winning factors, DOE sources say, were Stony Brook's proximity to the lab and Battelle's experience in managing large organizations like Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, Washington, next door to the polluted Hanford site used to store waste from nuclear weapons production. DOE says the new contract's higher annual fee1 million more than the 4.2 million paid to AUIreflects the added cost of ensuring environmental safety and restoring public confidence in the lab. The new team, called Brookhaven Science Associates, will have a 16-member board, including representatives from the six northeastern universities who make up AUI. But the majority of members will be Stony Brook and Battelle managers, Marburger said. Although DOE told bidders to rule out any layoffs or dismissals, Marburger says there will be a lot of change in the functions people perform. One of the most pressing issues for the new operator is the fate of the HFBR. Many neutron scientists are eager for it to come back online, but Senator Al D'Amato (R-NY) and Representative Michael Forbes (R-NY) say it's an environmental hazard that should be closed permanently. Pea is expected to decide by early spring, but even if he sides with the scientists, an environmental impact review will keep the HFBR shut until 1999. That is also the starting date for Brookhaven's newest facility, the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. Given those problems, Marburger says he's prepared for some long days on the job. I don't have any illusions, he told reporters. The next year will probably be a difficult one.