Financially, the UC recieves little gain or loss for managing the labs. Under the old contract, the DOE offered 6 million dollars in awards to the UC for its duties managing LANL, but this was entirely offset by security and safety penalties, which ultimately culminated in LANL recently needing to be shut down for several months.

Meanwhile, the lab's partnership with the UC acts as enticement for the brightest and most promising graduates of the University to head off to New Mexico to design bombs, rather than do research on campus and contribute back to the educational system.

As for the last commenter's post, I don't understand what's so much better about the UC than Texas. If your reasoning is about safety and security, then you need to look no further than the missing data disks and laser-induced eye injuries that happened within the last few years, all under UC management. And if your argument is that the UC will somehow make the labs "better" than Texas will, well, that's also null. The UC has zero policy control over the labs (the Regents have said so themselves, "we don't make the policy, we just do the science"), and even if they did, it'd be tough to get worse than an 80% nuclear weapons related budget.

The "new weapons" development going on at the labs is also rather complicated. New plutonium pits, the cores of modern nuclear warheads, are being manufactured at Livermore and Los Alamos, and plans have been made to expand that capacity. These pits are being used not in brand new bombs, but to replace the warheads of existing, aging bombs. However, these pits are often much more powerful, deadly, and come loaded with expanded miscellaneous capabilities: in essense, they become new weapons. This program, the Stockpile Stewardship Program, breaks international law: according to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, these aging warheads should be dismantled and taken off the US arsenal, not beefed up for another several decades of inducing - at the best, fear and terror. At the worst...