Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Co. kicked off its 60-day transition period this week to become the new major remediation contractor at the Central Plateau area of Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, under a potential 10-year, $10-billion agreement.
On Dec. 4 the joint venture comprising Amentum, Fluor and Atkins will take over from Jacobs subsidiary CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. The new contract will use DOE’s end-state model. The incumbent is finishing up work on a contract that began in October 2008 and is currently valued at $6.4 billion.
Since 2008, CH2M has received two one-year extensions, with the last one valued at $500 million.
Central Plateau Cleanup President Scott Sax is a familiar face at the sprawling complex in that he held a similar post at Washington Closure Hanford, a joint venture between what was then AECOM Management Services, now Amentum, and Bechtel as well as CH2M. Washington Closure Hanford held the DOE Central Plateau contract, prior to the work being assumed by CH2M.
The existing workforce at Central Plateau has been doing high-hazard work for a long time and knows how to do it safely, Sax said in a two-minute video posted on the Central Plateau Cleanup Co. website. “Let’s get off the river in five years” and cocoon a couple of the remaining nuclear reactors at Hanford, he added.
The new cleanup team will carry out DOE’s first cost-plus indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract with incentives. “
That’s a mouthful,” but what it means is that the contractor team must economically deliver major, measurable environmental progress on the Central Plateau, Sax said.
Hanford’s Central Plateau area is the site of various fuel processing facilities, waste disposal operations, and affiliated infrastructure left over from decades of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War and the Manhattan Project.
The Central Plateau contract is separate from the Hanford tank waste management contract, currently held by Amentum-led Washington River Protection Solutions. In May, DOE awarded a follow-on tank contract to a BWX Technologies group, but the agency is now considering whether to recompete that award.
While CH2M has essentially demolished the Plutonium Finishing Plant, workers are still addressing the contaminated debris from the facility.
The new plateau contract calls for deactivation, decommissioning, and demolition of various structures; cleaning up old waste sites; and general waste management. The new team will also be responsible for preventing contaminated plumes from old Hanford operations from reaching the Columbia River.
The new team must oversee compliance with the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act or Superfund, as well as court-imposed consent decrees on remediation.
The Central Plateau Cleanup team was initially headed by AECOM Management Services when the DOE Office of Environmental Management first awarded the contract in December. In January of this year, however, Los Angeles-based AECOM completed the sale of its Management Services unit to two New York investment groups, which named the new company Amentum.
In late April, the Government Accountability Office rejected a bid protest brought by a Bechtel-led team and cleared the way for Central Plateau Cleanup to start transition. But with on-site staffing at Hanford and other nuclear cleanup sites lowered because of COVID-19 precautions, the Department of Energy waited until recently to approve the start of transition.
