B&W Y-12 LOOKING TO ENGAGE SMALL BUSINESSES ON UPF PROCUREMENTS

With numerous subcontract awards related to construction of the Uranium Processing Facility scheduled for Fiscal Year 2013, B&W Y-12 officials yesterday urged small businesses yesterday to initiate discussions with the contractor. “Now is the time to be talking to us about what your capabilities are to help us line you up with the package and the needs that we have coming up,” B&W Y-12 UPF Project Procurement Manager Richard Brown said yesterday at the Department of Energy Regional Small Business Summit in Knoxville, Tenn. Awards expected in the near term include work for early site preparation and design of the plant’s processing equipment, but Brown added that the contractor had “barely started” on the multi-step procurement process for most of those contracts. “We have a lot of procurement packages coming out over the next three years and the best time to line up suppliers for these packages and for us to scope them properly is now,” he said. “We’re looking at something right now just shy of $2 billion in purchase orders and subcontracts over about 300 packages. That’s an average cost of about $6 million.”