The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is taking bids for cleanup of the radioactively contaminated Luckey Site in Ohio under the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP).
The small business set-aside award would have a five-year base term and an option for another five years, according to the request for proposals issued on June 17.
The primary job is extraction and off-site disposal of soil, sediment, debris, and fill, the procurement notice says. But the long list of additional responsibilities includes operating an on-site laboratory, stormwater management, water treatment, and restoration of the excavated areas.
The selected contractor will be required to have know-how in beryllium monitoring and worker safety, health physics, running environmental laboratories, dismantling structures and debris disposal, and waste management.
Annual funding for the job is expected to be capped at $30 million, the Army Corps said.
The 40-acre property, just over 20 miles outside of Toledo in the village of Luckey, was home to beryllium processing for national defense from 1949 to 1961. Remaining contaminants in the soil, groundwater, and additional materials encompass beryllium, lead, radium-226, thorium-230, uranum-234, and uranium-238. A warehouse, production building, rail spur, and other infrastructure also remain on-site.
The current remediation provider is North Wind Portage, under a 2015 contract worth up to $100 million that Portage won before it was bought by North Wind in 2017. A North Wind spokesperson said earlier this year the company did intend to bid on the new contract. The company did not respond to a query this week.
Two other companies with experience in FUSRAP contracting, Jacobs and HydroGeoLogic, also did not respond by deadline Friday to queries regarding their potential interest in the Luckey Site.
Bids are due by 3 p.m. local time Aug. 5. Extensions are not anticipated, the Army Corps said. This is expected to be the final cleanup contract at the Luckey Site, according to the Army Corps’ update on FUSRAP operations in 2019.
In a June 4 update, the Army Corps said site-wide remediation at Luckey was 35% finished, with over 64,083 cubic yards of contaminated soil excavated. A slightly fresher infographic upped that 65,445 cubic yards, plus treatment nearly 2.6 million gallons of water.
Roughly 37,000 cubic yards of contaminated material is expected to be extracted and shipped off-site in fiscal 2020, which runs from Oct. 1, 2019, to Sept. 30 of this year.
Established in 1974, and shifted from the Department of Energy to the Army Corps in 1997, FUSRAP provides remediation of properties contaminated by nuclear weapons and nuclear power operations from the 1940s to 1960s under the Manhattan Engineer District and Atomic Energy Commission. There were 23 active sites in 10 states as of 2019.
For fiscal 2020, Congress appropriated $200 million for the program. It also rejected the Trump administration proposal to shift management of FUSRAP back to the Energy Department, under its Office of Legacy Management. The on-site work would remain under the Army Corps.
For fiscal 2021, the administration again proposed to relocate the program to DOE, with $150 million in funding. The House and Senate have yet to issue their appropriations bills for the upcoming budget year, but Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) has already said lawmakers are not likely to support taking FUSRAP away from the Army Corps.
