Friday marked the official start of the 30-day window during which the Department of Energy has said it will release a draft solicitation for the Savannah River Site management and operations contract that includes oversight of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s tritium-refining operations.
The window is open through April 29, a Sunday, according to the presolicitation synopsis the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management posted online Feb. 28.
The Energy Department had not posted the draft solicitation at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. The agency expects to host interested bidders for a site tour in Aiken, S.C., in April.
Meanwhile, DOE had made no move at deadline Friday to extend the contract for incumbent Savannah River Site manager Savannah River Nuclear Solutions: a Fluor-led partnership that includes Honeywell and Stoller Newport News Nuclear. The company’s 10-year, $9.5 billion site management contract is scheduled to expire on July 31.
The Environmental Management office, which runs DOE’s roughly $7-billion-a-year Cold War nuclear weapons cleanup program, owns the Savannah River Site’s two major contracts: the management contract that includes the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) tritium work, and a separate liquid-waste cleanup contract.
The liquid-waste contract was due to change hands this year, but now is up in the air after the Government Accountability Office in February upheld a bid protest against the October award to Savannah River EcoManagement: a joint venture of BWX Technologies, Bechtel, and Honeywell. This week, DOE proposed a 10-month extension for the AECOM-led incumbent.
Gossip persists among industry representatives that DOE might be holding the Savannah River Site management and operations solicitation until the liquid waste competition is resolved and the competitive landscape for the management contract becomes clearer.
Some of the bidders on the latest liquid-waste pact are also conceivable fits for the management and operations work, which besides the NNSA tritium mission includes managing the Savannah River National Laboratory and running solid-waste cleanup at the site. Fluor, for example, leads the incumbent site manager, and was a member (with Westinghouse) of one of the teams that unsuccessfully bid on the new liquid-waste contract. Now, the company will get a second chance at that work after a protest apparently forced DOE to reconsider the three bids.
The Energy Department has not said how long the next Savannah River Site management pact might run, or how much the deal might cost.
Whatever the terms, the next Savannah River manager will take the reins as the Pentagon’s 30-year nuclear deterrent modernization program begins a ramp-up that makes the NNSA tritium work as urgent as it has been since the end of the Cold War. Tritium gas, extracted at Savannah River from fuel rods irradiated in the Watts Bar Unit 1 nuclear reactor owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, increases the potency of nuclear weapons. Some of the potency older warheads lose as their fissile cores age can be restored by adding tritium.
The NNSA’s tritium sustainment program, which funds the Savannah River work, got an 80-percent budget increase to almost $200 million in 2018, after Congress finally passed a permanent budget for the fiscal year last week. The White House wants to bump that up another 3.5 percent or so to $205 million in fiscal 2019, according to the latest NNSA budget request.
The increase will help the agency train staff at the Tritium Extraction Facility at Savannah River, and pay for two tritium extractions there in the next fiscal year in a prelude to “ the ramp-up to full operations mode,” according to the budget request. The money also will fund NNSA efforts to license a second nuclear reactor, Watts Bar Unit 2, to produce tritium-bearing fuel rods around October 2020.
