B&W EXPECTING NO SANDIA IMPACT FROM Y-12/PANTEX FIGHT

B&W has continued to fight the National Nuclear Security Administration on its selection of a Bechtel-led team for its combined Y-12/Pantex contract, but B&W President and CEO Jim Ferland said last week that he didn’t envision the procurement battle impacting the NNSA’s other looming opportunity, for Sandia National Laboratories. “An awful lot of the background work getting ready for the Sandia procurement’s already been done,” Ferland said in an Aug. 8 conference call with Wall Street analysts. “So the delay in Y-12/Pantex really doesn’t impact our positioning or our probabilities on Sandia, as far as we can see.” B&W, the lead incumbent at both Y-12 and Pantex, has twice protested the NNSA’s decisions on the Y-12/Pantex procurement, first over its selection of Bechtel-led Consolidated Nuclear Security, and later, over the approach the agency took after the Government Accountability Office upheld part of initial protests by B&W and another team led by Jacobs/Fluor. The GAO has until Sept. 25 to decide the latest protest, and the NNSA has said it will not make a new contract award until after the GAO makes its ruling.

The NNSA has said little publicly about its plans for the Sandia contract since issuing a Request for Information a year ago seeking input from industry on potentially consolidating portions of the Sandia contract with the Kansas City Plant contract. The Sandia contract expires at the end of September (though the government has two three-month options it could exercise) and the agency will certainly have to extend Lockheed Martin’s contract to run the lab further to run what is expected to be a lengthy procurement. “Sandia remains an opportunity for us looking forward,” Ferland said. “It seems to continue to slide out quarter-to-quarter. But it’s large enough that it certainly has all of our attention in the industry.”