Los Alamos National Lab employees are anxiously awaiting the climax of a four-year saga: a decision that will determine who runs the world's most glamorous and controversial nuclear weapons lab and that also could end the University of California's unchallenged six-decade domination of the U.S. weapons program.

An announcement could come soon, perhaps even Friday.

The decision will wrap up a six-month competition to run scandal-shaken Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945. UC and its industrial partners, including San Francisco-based Bechtel National Inc., are competing for the contract against aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp. and its allies - the huge University of Texas system, several New Mexico universities and various industrial partners.

Whoever gets the contract will be in charge of the lab for the next seven years - and possibly 13 years if the new management is deemed good enough to earn a six-year extension offered in the contract. A Lockheed Martin takeover would be seen as an example of a growing trend toward the "privatization" of the nation's nuclear weapons complex.

Loss of the contract by UC would be a crushing blow to the university system's reputation and, perhaps, to the state of California, which owes much of its international economic clout and attractiveness to investors' perception of the state as the Nobel laureate-packed front line of scientific and technological advances.

Lab officials have always insisted they run Los Alamos as a matter of public service, not for the money - and understandably so, because until recently, it was no way for a giant university system to get rich. Each year, the Department of Energy typically gave UC about $9 million in annual reimbursements for its Los Alamos work, which was peanuts considering the lab's size, prestige and overall budget. (In January, DOE punished UC for bungled work at Los Alamos by cutting its 2005 award to $3 million.)

In the next contract, though, the maximum potential annual reimbursement is immensely higher, $79 million, depending on the contractor's performance.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, a quasi-independent agency under the U.S. Energy Department, was scheduled to announce the winner around Dec. 1. This week, however, rumors of an early decision swept the Los Alamos lab, where thousands of staff members await word of their fate. Staffers have spread word that an announcement could come as early as Friday, and a Los Alamos official refused Tuesday to rule out the possibility.

"There's a lot of tension, just waiting for a decision," said Los Alamos safety specialist John Jennings, who helped FBI investigators expose financial corruption at the lab in 2002-03.

UC has run the lab since 1943 without having to compete for its Energy Department contracts. But in 2003, Los Alamos and its management by UC came under fire after a series of security, safety, financial and managerial scandals at the lab, and the Energy Department and Congress ordered that all future contracts be open to outside bidders.

Several lab staff members told The Chronicle this week that they thought the Lockheed-Texas team had the best shot at winning the contract after what some view as a ghastly parade of UC screw-ups.

"The morale here is abysmal," said theoretical physicist Brad Lee Holian. "People's lives have been wrenched apart by the political games that have been played. You can't hold people's careers by the heels out over the balcony without them feeling threatened and cheapened."

A 20-year employee, Collin Sadler, a project leader in the lab's detonator surveillance division, said he favored UC partly because he believed it offered a more attractive retirement system. But he expects Lockheed to win, and "most (staffers) appear to be resigned to the fate of the gods."