An Atkins-led joint venture beat out four competing bids for a five-year, $318 million Energy Department contract to operate depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion facilities at DOE’s former gaseous diffusion plants near Paducah, Ky., and Piketon, Ohio.
Atkins partnered with Fluor Corp. and Westinghouse to form Mid-America Conversion Services. The companies announced their winning bid Thursday, shortly after a DOE press release about the award hit the wires. The combination cost-plus-award-fee and firm-fixed-price contract covers five years of converting some 740,000 metric tons of DUF6 produced during decades of uranium enrichment at now-shuttered DOE gaseous diffusion plants.
DUF6 conversion began in July 2010 at Portsmouth and is expected to conclude around 2032. Paducah operations started in February 2011 and are slated to finish in 2044. Annual DUF6 processing capacity at tops out at 13,500 metric tons a year at Portsmouth, and at 18,000 metric tons a year at Paducah, according to the contract held by incumbent conversion operator BWXT Conversion Services.
The newly awarded DUF6 operations pact comes in below the low end of the $400-million to $600-million range that Ralph Holland, deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and project management for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, teased earlier this month at the agency’s 2016 National Cleanup Summit.
BWXT Conversion Services’ existing DUF6 contract is worth nearly $500 million and was set to expire by Sept. 30. The incumbent’s parent company, BWX Technologies of Lynchburg, Va., was in the running for the follow-on Mid-America just clinched.
Minutes before announcing the Mid-America win, DOE announced it would extend BWXT’s existing DUF6 contract for up to four months, potentially through January, at a cost of just over $35 million. The transition to Mid-America from BWXT Conversion will begin this year, according to Atkins’ press release.
