A decades’ worth of cleanup work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which including options is valued at $1.7 billion, is officially out for bids, the agency’s Office of Environmental Management announced late Wednesday.
The work entails cleaning up Cold War-era waste, both toxic and radioactive, scattered throughout the sprawling, 36-square-mile LANL campus. Big caches of radioactive equipment and material known as transuranic waste are covered under the deal, as is cleanup of a chromium plume that has contaminated LANL soil.
The cost-plus-award-fee deal kicks in Oct. 1, 2017, and includes a five-year base period, a three-year options, and two-year option. In addition, the winner of the contract will be responsible, under a future subcontract with the LANL management and operations contractor, for cleaning up some of the transuranic waste created at the lab by the soon-to-begin nuclear weapons modernization program, according to the final solicitation.
Final bids are due Nov. 21, and prospective bidders must notify DOE of their intent to bid 28 days before the due date.
In 2015, DOE announced it would bid out the cleanup work now held by Los Alamos National Security — the lab’s current management and operations contractor for the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration — after the 2014 radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. WIPP closed after the accident and is slated to accept new shipments of radioactively contaminated material and equipment from across the DOE complex by April, the agency has said.
That WIPP leak was blamed on a container of LANL waste that was not packaged properly by Los Alamos National Security subcontractor EnergySolutions of Salt Lake City. To keep cleanup going while the agency worked on the solicitation just released, DOE in 2015 awarded Los Alamos National Security a short-term contract, worth $310 million and set to expire Sept.30, 2017.
Los Alamos National Security is a conglomerate that includes Bechtel National and the University of California. Bechtel was among the companies that registered for a March 2015 industry day at LANL that well predated the release of a draft solicitation for the next round of legacy cleanup work at Los Alamos. However, the company did not show up for a presolicitation conference at LANL in June.
Also absent from the June pre-solicitation meeting was anyone directly employed by the University of California or EnergySolutions, according to a copy of the registration list DOE posted online.
According to a DOE cost estimate last revised in August, remaining legacy waste cleanup at LANL will cost up to $4 billion and possibly take until 2040 to complete. Some of that work is beyond the scope of the contract just put out to bid.
With the proposal due date still about two months away, industry is keeping mostly quiet about its interest in the decade-long project. Several companies involved with major DOE legacy nuclear-cleanup work attended the pre-solicitation conference about the LANL remediation in June, though these were largely unresponsive to queries this week. These include:
- AREVA Federal Service. AREVA spokesman Curtis Roberts declined comment in a Friday email.
- BWXT Technologies. Company spokesman Jud Simmons wrote in a Thursday email: “we believe our expertise matches up well with the requirements outlined in the request for proposal, but we don’t have any announcements to make at this time.”
- CB&I Federal Services. CB&I spokeswoman Gentry Brann did not reply to a request for comment Thursday.
- CH2M. Katie Warner, the company’s chief of staff, declined to comment in a Thursday email.
- Fluor Corp. Fluor spokeswoman Annika Toenniessen declined to comment in a Thursday email.
- Stoller Newport News Nuclear. Company spokeswoman Christine Miller said in a Thursday email the company does not comment on active procurements.
- Westinghouse’s WECTEC subsidiary. Courtney Boone, a Westinghouse spokeswoman, said the company would not comment on the competition until after it had submitted a bid.
