The management and operations contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico stands to earn up to $12.5 million in fees in fiscal 2018, based on its capacity to carry out a number of missions, including mining additional storage space and mitigation of areas contaminated by the 2014 underground radiation release, according to the Energy Department.
The department laid out potential award fees and expectations in an Aug. 31 performance evaluation and measurement plan and annual fee plan for Nuclear Waste Partnership, covering the period from Oct. 1, 2017, to Sept. 30, 2018.
Twenty-five percent of the available fee ($3.1 million) will be based on five subjective criteria: mission performance, regulatory compliance, management performance, safety and health performance, and cost control.
The remaining 75 percent of the available fee ($9.4 million) will be based on objective operational criteria, covering a long list of performance-based incentives, including progress in mining the new Panel 8 storage space; dealing with “aging and degraded infrastructure” at WIPP; continuing waste emplacement; mitigation in Panel 7, where a waste container burst open and released radiation in February 2014; and finishing emplacement of all remaining DOE Type I waste stored temporarily at the privately operated Waste Control Specialists site in West Texas.
AECOM and BWX Technologies are partners in the WIPP prime, along with subcontractor AREVA Federal Services. They first received the contract in April 2012, and took over operations that October of the nation’s only permanent deep underground repository for transuranic waste. The mine was closed for nearly three years following the radiation incident, reopening last December.
DOE announced on Sept. 15 that NWP would retain the management and operation contract through September 2020. The three-year contract renewal is worth about $928 million.
