A joint venture, APTIM-North Wind Construction, has won a $92 million contract from the Energy Department to build the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management announced the four-year award in a Tuesday press release. The agency received two proposals for the firm-fixed-price contract, but did not release the identity of the other bidder.
Several industry sources contacted Thursday also could not identify the losing bidder. Among the 20 companies registered to attend an April industry meeting on the project were Atkins, AVANTech, Fluor, Kiewit, and Veolia Nuclear Solutions Federal Services.
One industry source acknowledged his employer had looked at the mercury treatment plant solicitation, but decided not to pursue it, in part because it might conceivably hinder its chances of winning the Oak Ridge Reservation business.
Texas-based APTIM is an engineering and program management company and successor to CB&I. After acquiring CB&I’s capital services business in mid-2017, Veritas Capital rebranded it as APTIM.
Idaho Falls, Idaho, based-North Wind is a DOE subcontractor based that specializes in construction and environmental services. It has a five-year, $163 million contract for transuranic waste processing through October 2020 at Oak Ridge.
The new facility will treat mercury-laden water that flows from the Y-12 National Security Complex storm sewer to East Fork Poplar Creek. The facility is important to future remediation at Y-12 as buildings contaminated with mercury are demolished over time.
Along with building the treatment plant, headworks, and transfer pipeline, the vendor will test the systems and turn the facility over to an operating contractor. The cleanup office has said previously it hopes to have the plant ready to operate in 2022.
Once fully operational, the facility will be able to treat up to 3,000 gallons of water per minute.
“This facility is a central component of our cleanup strategy at Y-12,” Jay Mullis, who heads the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, said in a press release. “We are incredibly grateful for the support we’ve received from Congress that allows us to move forward with construction, and we are excited for the opportunities and progress this project will help us achieve at one of the nation’s most important national security sites.”
Built in the 1940s to enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project, Y-12 also was a key part of Cold War nuclear weapons work. Until the 1960s the facility used thousands of pounds of mercury in its operations to separate lithium in the uranium enrichment process. It continues to contribute to U.S. nuclear stockpile stewardship under DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.
Construction of the mercury plant would set the stage for DOE to tear down the Alpha-4, Alpha-5, and Beta 4 buildings and remediate the soil underneath the structures. These mammoth mercury-contaminated buildings used for uranium separation at Y-12 have been closed for years and deemed “excess facilities” by DOE.
Comment Deadline Approaches on New Oak Ridge Landfill
Separately stakeholders have until Monday to submit public comment on the Energy Department’s proposed new waste disposal facility at the Oak Ridge Reservation.
Officially called the Environmental Management Disposal Facility (EMDF) the project is a proposed a 2.2-million-cubic yard landfill to replace the current site that has been taking waste since 2002 and is projected to fill up by the mid-2020s..
The existing landfill has taken in mostly dirt and debris from structures being torn down at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP), previously called K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where uranium enrichment occurred from World War II until the 1980s. Completion of ETTP remediation is targeted for 2020.
Public comments on the landfill can be emailed to [email protected].
The new landfill is part of a busy period at Oak Ridge.
Along with the just-announced APTIM-North Wind contract, DOE expects to issue a draft request for proposals in the next couple months for a multiyear Oak Ridge Reservation Cleanup contract valued at up to $6 billion. The Oak Ridge contract would be a successor of sorts to the existing $2.7 billion URS-CH2M Hill Oak Ridge (UCOR) contract for remediation of ETTP and related work, which runs through July 2020.
Chemical waste, low-level radioactive waste, and mixed low-level waste from Y-12 and the Oak Ridge Reservation cleanup would go into the new landfill. Like the old site, the new facility would be located in the Bear Creek Valley.
The Oak Ridger newspaper reported Tuesday that DOE officials briefed a concerned Oak Ridge City Council about the project. The landfill will need to be approved by DOE, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the state.
