An APTIM-North Wind joint venture that ran into bad luck and bedrock while building the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee may have its contract extended beyond the current Dec. 5 expiration, a Department of Energy spokesperson said recently.
“The Mercury Treatment Facility is scheduled to be operational in 2025,” a DOE spokesperson said last week in response to an inquiry from Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. “APTIM North Wind is steadily making progress on construction; however, the facility will not be finished in December 2022, so we anticipate their contract will be extended.”
In March, DOE said the project — designed to remove mercury that contaminated local waters during Cold War nuclear-weapons production — was about 40% complete.
But in May, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned of schedule delays resulting factors such as bedrock encountered at the construction site and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The joint venture “encountered bedrock and soils problems during construction of the foundations of the project’s two main buildings,” the GAO said in the report that looked at several major infrastructure projects in the DOE weapons complex.
APTIM-North Wind hoped to start construction in late 2018, soon after the initial four-year contract was awarded by DOE, but problems arose, GAO said.
Bosses at the DOE Office of Environmental Management reported to GAO the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other outside contractors were brought on to provide “needed technical expertise,” to deal with the problems, according to the report.
While the schedule slipped, GAO said the Office of Environmental Management said it does not expect big cost overruns because under the firm fixed-price contract, much of the extra expense will be borne by APTIM-North Wind.
During the Cold War, Y- 12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge focused on producing lilithium-6 for nuclear weapons, which created large amounts of mercury that entered the environment, GAO said.
The project being built under the APTIM-North Wind contract, currently valued at $112 million, consists of a headworks facility and the treatment plant. “The headworks facility plans to capture creek flow on the west end of Y-12, store excess stormwater, remove grit from the water, and pump it through a pipeline to the treatment plant on the east side of Y-12,” according to GAO. The treated water is then to flow into the East Fork Poplar Creek.
The project, expected to have a through-put capacity of 3,000 gallons of water per minute, should be complete in September 2025, according to GAO.
The project also encountered more contaminated water than expected and a 2020 stop-work order resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, GAO said.
