Contract to be Set-Aside for Small Businesses, Official Says
Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
5/9/2014
While the schedule for release of a Request for Proposals for the new contract to operate the Oak Ridge Transuranic Waste Processing Center is uncertain, the Department of Energy expects to be able to make an award decision by the time the current contract expires in early 2015, a senior DOE Oak Ridge official said this week. “We don’t know the exact date and time an RFP will be issued, but we are working towards the January date when the current contract expires,” Mark Whitney, Manager of the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, said at a House Cleanup Caucus briefing on Oak Ridge. “We are getting close to that date. The SEB [Source Evaluation Board] is making a lot of progress and we’re still shooting for January 2015 for an award of the follow-on contract. We’ll see if we get there, but that’s our anticipation at this point,” he said.
The TWPC is used to prepare contact- and remote-handled transuranic waste at Oak Ridge for off-site disposal. The facility is currently managed by Wastren Advantage Inc., which last year experienced a set of safety and operational issues the contractor has worked to address. Last fall, DOE issued a sources sought notice with a size standard of $35.5 million to help determine if the new TWPC operations contract can be set-aside for small businesses, but since then there has been little public action on the procurement. On the sidelines of this week’s briefing, Whitney told WC Monitor that DOE intends to make the new contract a small business set-aside, and that he did not expect any change in the size standard to be used.
