The Energy Department Office of Environmental Management (EM) expects to speed cleanup of its nuclear sites by decades and save “$100s of millions” in life-cycle costs, according to the Donald Trump administration’s fiscal 2020 budget request.
The request, issued in March, would trim the DOE nuclear remediation appropriation from $7.2 billion in fiscal 2019 to $6.5 billion in fiscal 2020, which begins Oct. 1.
The end-state philosophy is called a key “reform initiative” for contracting and an effort to reduce the EM program’s life-cycle cost estimate. “If these [expedited work] goals can be met, the program can begin to reduce the programs life cycle estimate that has increased over the past 8 years to over $369 billion,” according to the budget justification document.
The overall DOE environmental liability increased by $110 billion, to $494 billion, in fiscal 2018, mostly due to the rising cost for cleanup of the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Government Accountability Office said in March in a two-year update on high-risk operations. Most of the liability falls under the Office of Environmental Management.
“The principle idea is to pay more fee for early and under cost completion of work,” in an effort to replicate success made with cost-plus-incentive fee contracts used for closure sites such as the Rocky Flats weapons plant in Colorado, the budget request says.
The idea is to convert most of EM’s existing cost-plus-award fee contracts at its 16 active locations to cost-plus-incentive contracts focused on end states as they are recompeted over the next several years.
In the meantime, the office will seek to tweak existing contracts to include incentives for performance. This adjustment to existing contracts, which agency officials have alluded to in public forums, is not detailed in the budget document.
This sort of change could be done by readjusting the performance incentives within existing contracts, one industry source said Friday. He believes the Energy Department has already “started the dialogue” on this issue with certain vendors.
The budget justification document indicates the status quo focuses too much on goals that don’t necessarily hasten project completion.
“A cogent overall strategy will be very important to the successful offeror,” according to DOE. “The contractors will have to make progress on difficult cleanup, not just less-challenging scopes of work,” even if this means not picking the cheapest contract option.
Two multibillion-dollar solicitations using end-state incentives were issued in February for the Hanford Site in Washington state – the Tank Closure Contract and the Central Plateau Cleanup Contract. Additional similar procurements are scheduled in 2019.
The Energy Department expects this approach to yield more innovative approaches to remediation. The DOE budget document does not provide details of the potential cost savings or schedule acceleration.
For now, however, the expected completion dates for remediation of Cold War sites under the Office of Environmental Management remain the same for fiscal 2020 as they were for 2019.
The project completion dates range from 2020 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state to anywhere from 2070 to 2075 for the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The range for Hanford and other sites means DOE has only a 50% confidence level in the date. A single year indicates the confidence level is 80%.
The Energy Department anticipates the Separations Process Research Unit in New York will be done in 2021 while the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California would be fully remediated in 2023.
Other completion dates include: Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico (2028), Nevada National Security Site (2030), Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) in Utah (2034), Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico (2035- 2042), Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (2036), West Valley Demonstration Project in New York (2040-2045), Idaho National Laboratory (2045-2060), Portsmouth Site in Ohio (2039-2041), Oak Ridge in Tennessee (2046), Paducah Site in Kentucky (2065-2070), and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina (2065).
No projected completion date is published yet for the Energy Technology Engineering Center at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California. The Energy Department is still awaiting a final cleanup document, the program management plan (PMP), to be issued by the state of California in the first half of this year.
