Bechtel National earned just over $7 million in fees for its work building the Waste Treatment Plant at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland Wash.: good for 71 percent of the total available for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2016.
DOE grades Bechtel in two major categories: the less-quantifiable project management category, which evaluates the contractor’s managerial skill, and the more-quantifiable project performance category, which reflects the company’s progress on cost and schedule milestones written into its Waste Treatment Plant prime contract. That pact, awarded in 2000, is now worth up to $14.6 billion through Dec. 31, 2022.
Bechtel scored high marks in three of the six award fee objectives in the project management category, but nabbed just 50 percent of the available fees for the Quality Assurance Program and Quality of Performance; Quality Documentation; and Nuclear Safety, according to an annual award fee scorecard DOE released this week.
In the project performance category, Bechtel secured 85 percent of its available award fee, but with the caveat that the Waste Treatment Plant “has been recently slightly trending negatively for cost and schedule.”
The Waste Treatment Plant is being designed to treat more than 55 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste leftover from Cold War-era plutonium production for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal.
The plant must legally begin treating Hanford’s briny, less-radioactive low-level waste by 2023, though Bechtel would forfeit more than $150 million in fees if that treatment does not begin in 2022. Treatment of the site’s sludgier, more-radioactive high-level waste must begin in 2036, a federal judge ruled last year.
