The two partners in Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, the incumbent cleanup team at the Department of Energy Portsmouth Site in Ohio, are rivals in pursuit of the new Decontamination & Decommissioning Contract, industry sources said this week.
BWX Technologies is leading a team along with Jacobs and APTIM that is vying for the follow-on Portsmouth decommissioning contract, the sources said. That team is competing against a joint venture made up of Amentum, Fluor and Veolia.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management issued its solicitation for the decommissioning work, potentially worth $5.97 billion over a decade, in May.
Many of the same suitors are also competing for the Portsmouth Paducah Project Office Operations and Site Mission Support Contract.
The source familiar with the operations and support contact believes there are at least four teams vying for that potentially 10-year, $2.9-billion contract.
One is an Atkins-Westinghouse combo, which amounts to two-thirds of the incumbent depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion contractor at Portsmouth and the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
Fluor, the third member of incumbent Mid-America Conversion Services is apparently skipping pursuit of the new deal, which combines running the conversion plants along with some cleanup and operations chores at the former gaseous diffusion plants.
Other joint ventures believed to be in the chase at Portsmouth-Paducah include a Bechtel-Amentum team, a Huntington Ingalls-Jacobs team and a BWXT-Honeywell team.
There could be a fifth DUF6 team, one of the sources said Thursday, adding that with fewer in-person meetings over the pandemic, industry chatter does not flow as freely as the pre-COVID days.
The Portsmouth decommissioning contract could be awarded this year or early in 2023, a top Environmental Management procurement boss, Angela Watmore, told DOE advisory committee chairs last month in Santa Fe, N.M.
DOE once thought the two Portsmouth and Paducah awards could happen in the same timeframe; the two incumbent deals both are slated to expire March 28, 2023. However, it now appears decommissioning will come first, one of the sources said.
The operations and site mission business combines aspects of different contracts, which makes it more complex, one of the sources said.
By contrast, the decommissioning business is a straightforward replacement of the current Fluor-BWXT contract.
