The National Nuclear Security Administration was scheduled to brief losing bidders next week about the agency’s decision to entrust a team led by Fluor, Irving, Texas, with management of the country’s two main nuclear-weapon production sites, sources said this week.
The winning team, Nuclear Production One (NPOne) — which also includes junior partner Amentum, Germantown, Md. — beat out two other bidders to take home the potentially 10-year, $28 billion contract to manage the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The deal has five years of firm money and five one-year options.
Debriefs were scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, sources told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor this week. BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va., and Bechtel National, Reston, Va., each led bids. Both companies have managed the two production sites before. The incumbent Bechtel-led team took over in 2014 from two BWX Technologies-led teams. The companies declined to comment for this story.
Pantex is the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) main nuclear-weapons service center, performing major and minor upgrades and maintenance for the entire U.S. stockpile. Y-12 is the agency’s weapons-uranium hub, manufacturing nuclear-weapon secondary stages and processing uranium for use in naval reactor fuel.
If after the scheduled debriefs next week either Bechtel or BWX Technologies thinks the NNSA broke procurement rules or federal law with the award to NPOne, they could protest the award. Otherwise, NPOne will take over the sites on April 1.
The agency has aggressively signaled that it believes it has run a water-tight competition for the Pantex and Y-12 contract, and that its decision about the long-term future of the production sites ought to be final.
“The selection of the new contractor was made with great care,” NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby wrote in an email to agency hands on Monday.
A year ago, the agency’s top procurement official was more forceful still.
“We don’t get protested,” Bob Raines, associate administrator for acquisition and project management, said in a virtual presentation to the Tennessee-based Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association .“[W]e’ve only been protested once and we won that protest.”
The protested contract to which Raines referred is incumbent Consolidated Nuclear Security’s contract. BWX Technologies, which managed Pantex and Y-12 under separate contracts before the NNSA decided to combine management of the production sites, lodged a three-part protest in 2013.
While it has lost the big prize, leaving three years worth of options on the table, Consolidated Nuclear Security will remain at Y-12 at least through 2025 to finish building the Uranium Processing Facility: the key infrastructure upgrades that will replace the World War II-vintage Building 9212 and allow the NNSA to keep manufactureing nuclear-weapon secondary stages in Tennessee for much of the rest of this century. The agency has said the three-building facility will cost no more than $6.5 billion to build.
Meanwhile, Fluor declined to comment this week about the key personnel who will lead Nuclear Production One.
“The Government required three Key Personnel positions — Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or President, Chief Information Officer (CIO), and UPF Interface Manager,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in an email on Friday. “Offerors were able to propose additional Key Personnel positions. The Key Personnel positions proposed by the awardee will be posted in the final contract after the transition period.”
Out of all the marquee partners on Consolidated Nuclear Security, only security provider SOC will remain at the sites after the transition, according to a Tuesday announcement from Fluor. The other two major NPOne subcontractors are Criterion Systems and General Atomics, Fluor said.
