PHOENIX, Ariz. — Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White said this week she wishes her office had moved sooner to cancel the procurement for a decade-long liquid waste management contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
As with many government decisions, this one “could have been more timely,” White said in an interview with Weapons Complex Monitor.
On Feb. 26, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management announced it would not go forward with the potential $6 billion contract award. The decision came almost three years after the draft request for proposals was issued and 16 months after the cleanup office made an initial award worth $4.7 billion to a contractor group led by BWX Technologies. In February 2018, the process largely restarted after the Government Accountability Office upheld a bid protest by a rival team.
White was confirmed by Congress and sworn in as assistant secretary for environmental management in late March 2018. The Energy Department took updated bids that spring from the three teams that filed the original proposals: the BWXT team, a Fluor-Westinghouse venture, and an AECOM-CH2M partnership.
While many issues at Savannah River are “interrelated,” it was purely an Environmental Management (EM) decision to cancel the contract, White said. It was not an outgrowth of ongoing talks between EM and DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) about their respective roles at Savannah River.
“This is an isolated EM decision” not to go forward, White said.
Environmental Management said Feb. 26 it now wants a single contractor in charge at the site of the L-Basin, H-Canyon, and liquid waste operations. L-Basin holds spent fuel assemblies from United States and foreign research reactors, and H-Canyon is a hardened nuclear chemical separations plant. Such a combination is in the “best interest” of the government, the DOE office said.
Both L-Basin and H-Canyon are now run under the SRS management and operations contract held by Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, which has been extended through July. Managing 36 million gallons of radioactive tank waste at the site is currently handled by AECOM-led Savannah River Remediation, which has an extension through March 31.
The Energy Department has said the existing contractors will remain on the job for the present, and White did not provide any additional details on potential contract extensions.
White touched upon the SRS cancellation a few hours after helping kick off the conference on Monday. She told the gathering a “completion-centric mindset” is growing within the weapons complex.
Many milestones have been reached within the past year, White said. Demolition of the vitrification plant at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York is done, work is underway on the new ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, and DOE published its final environmental study on remediation of the Energy Technology Engineering Center (ETEC) at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California, she noted.
