A team led by BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va., won a potentially 10-year, $45-billion liquid-waste cleanup contract at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Department of Energy said Thursday.
The winning team, Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure, consists of BWXT, Amentum and Fluor.
The Integrated Tank Disposition Contract awarded by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management calls for managing Hanford’s underground radioactive-waste tank farms, closing tanks and ultimately running the Bechtel-built Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.
With the Thursday announcement of the indefinite delivery indefinite quantity award, BWXT-led teams now are in charge of liquid waste management at both Hanford, the former plutonium production complexes near Richland, Wash., and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, DOE said in a press release.
There were two bidders for the contract, DOE confirmed Thursday afternoon. Two industry sources said Atkins apparently led the other team. A third industry source said Bechtel National and Jacobs were also believed to be part of teams. A bid protest is very possible given the size of the contract, the third source said.
The request for proposals for the Hanford integrated waste was published in October 2021. An Amentum-led team, Washington River Protection Solutions, currently handles the tank management aspect of the tank contract. DOE hopes the Direct-Fed-Low-Activity-Waste facilities at the Waste Treatment Plant, built by Bechtel, will start solidifying some of Hanford’s less-radioactive waste into glasslike cylinders by 2025.
This is the second time a BWXT-led team won the follow-on contract to the Washington River Protection Solutions deal. The BWXT team briefly won a Hanford tank management contract in 2020, before DOE decided to expand the scope of the contract to include operations of the vitrification plant.
This new Hanford tanks contract includes a 120-day transition period. It comes on the heels of news earlier in the week that a BWXT subsidiary won a $428-million National Nuclear Security Administration contract to provide conversion services and related work for highly enriched uranium.
There are about 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, leftover from decades of plutonium production, stored in underground tanks at Hanford.
