A pair of university systems plus just about every major contractor to run the sites in the last decade-plus were among the 49 entities whose representatives toured the Y-12 National Security Site and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, last month as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s competition to find a new site manager for those nuclear-weapons production sites.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency held site tours Sept. 22 at Y-12 and Sept. 24, after which some industry people said there appeared to be major three teams forming: one including former incumbent BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va., and Honeywell, Charlotte, N.C.; another with Fluor Corp., Irving, Texas, and Amentum, Germantown, Md.; and a third including Bechtel National, which is the lead partner on outgoing incumbent Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS).
But the complete list of site visitors the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) released late Monday includes a host of other industry staples, including HII Nuclear and Jacobs, Leidos and Westinghouse.
The NNSA’s list also revealed Texas A&M University, one of the three main partners in Los Alamos National Laboratory prime Triad National Security, visited Y-12 and Pantex.
A&M is the second pure-academic entity to express interest in what could be a $28 billion, decade-long joint site operations contract.
Prior to the site visit, the University of Tennessee system, a senior partner with Batelle at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, announced its intention to hook on with some industry team and bid on the next production-site contract.
Meanwhile, representatives of physical security firms Centerra and SOC — the latter is the security arm of CNS today at Y-12 and Pantex — likewise toured both plants last month.
There were also plenty of smaller-sized contractors that already dot the nuclear weapons complex as parts of various management teams, or as subcontractors. A few were:
- Akima
- North Wind
- Pro2Serve
- Strategic Management Solutions
- Tech Source
The NNSA announced in June it would not pick up any more options on the roughly $2-billion-a-year contract it awarded CNS in 2014. The team will leave three years of options on the table.
The agency plans to have a replacement contractor on site by Oct. 1, 2021, after a transition period notionally scheduled to start in June of that year, according to the draft request for proposals released in August.
