BWX Technologies still hopes its team can win the multibillion-dollar liquid waste management contract for the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, executives said Tuesday.
The Lynchburg, Va., company partnered with Bechtel and Honeywell in Savannah River EcoManagement, which last fall initially won a 10-year, $4.7 billion contract to take over the work. It resubmitted its bid in the second quarter after the Government Accountability Office in February upheld a protest from an AECOM-CH2M team that had competed for the deal.
The Energy Department is considering revised bids from all three original teams. The third is a Fluor-Westinghouse partnership.
“We still continue to expect a decision on that contract by the end of September of this year and we remain optimistic about the pipeline of future bids [for other DOE work],” David Black, BWXT senior vice president and chief financial officer, said Tuesday during the company’s quarterly earnings call with financial analysts.
The company had built the Savannah River Site liquid business into its income projections for 2018 prior to the successful protest being filed, said BWXT President and CEO Rex Geveden. The protest is effectively delaying the eventual award by nearly a year from October 2017 to September 2018, the CEO said.
The second DOE bid award would be followed by a 90-day transition from current contractor Savannah River Remediation, of which BWXT is a member, Geveden noted. Revenue from the BWXT-led EcoManagement liquid waste contract would not make a real impact on the balance sheet until 2019.
BWXT is also a junior member of the Battelle-led team that in April scored a five-year, $5 billion management contract extension at the Idaho National Laboratory. The extension keeps the venture at INL through September 2024. Likewise, Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) in April assumed the $1.4 billion, 10-year contract for legacy cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
