The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management expects to award a trio of big contracts, two of them re-awards following protests by losing bidders, by the end of the year.
The department hopes this month to reissue both the liquid waste management contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and a consolidated technical support award for the Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, said Tamara Miles, federal procurement director for DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center.
The office also expects within 60 to 90 days to issue a contract for construction of the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, Miles said Wednesday during a panel discussion at an Energy, Technology, and Environmental Business Association (ETEBA) conference in Knoxville, Tenn.
Savannah River EcoManagement, a venture led by BWX Technologies, won a 10-year, $4.7 billion liquid waste contract last October. In February, however, the Government Accountability Office upheld a bid protest brought by a team of AECOM and CH2M. The GAO determined the Energy Department failed to properly establish the viability of the winning bidder’s technical approach for processing the facility’s radioactive waste and converting it into more stable forms. The Energy Department had the original bidders submit refreshed proposals during the spring.
In July, DOE awarded a contract worth up to $137 million over five years to a subsidiary of Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based Professional Project Services (Pro2Serve) for technical support services for cleanup at the Paducah Site in Kentucky and Portsmouth Site in Ohio, along with the DOE office that oversees the work. But the following month the agency said it would revisit the procurement following a protest by a rival bidder, Strategic Management Solutions.
The Energy Department issued its request for proposals for the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility contract in March. The plant would treat mercury-contaminated water that flows from the Y-12 National Security Complex storm sewer to East Fork Poplar Creek. The $100 million facility would also treat further mercury contamination as more old buildings are torn down at Oak Ridge.
