The Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup officials are optimistic an overhaul of the contracting process will enable some sites undergoing environmental remediation to “leapfrog the current life-cycle baseline, and get us to done-done quicker,” a senior official said Wednesday.
The Office of Environmental Management (EM), with a current-year budget exceeding $7 billion, is responsible for remediation of 16 DOE sites around the country that have contributed to the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Larger projects, such as the Hanford Site in Washington state, are expected to continue for decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.
The office is working to implement Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment Anne Marie White’s goal to “reinvigorate” the completion mentality for remediation programs, Angela Watmore, a special adviser and head of contracting at EM, said in a keynote address to an Energy, Technology, and Environmental Business Association (ETEBA) conference in Knoxville, Tenn.
“We are trying to get more work done” in exchange for a higher contractor fee, Watmore said. The Energy Department is increasing fees available to contractors able to complete “end states” or milestones toward final cleanup.
“Can we get these sites cleaned up, faster, more safely, efficiently,” Watmore said. The burden is on the contractors to take the risk and explain how that can be achieved, she added.
The Environmental Management office is accustomed to awarding a contract with a scope of work that is largely in line with the preceding contract, Watmore said. Upcoming awards could be based more on individual targets picked by companies. Contractors that establish important milestones and show they can meet them will be competitive in the new system.
For example, one contractor might favor demolishing a building “down to the slab” to eliminate the most liability during the upcoming decade, while another might propose a far different approach to remediation over 10 years.
Insights can be found in the recently issued draft request for proposals for the Hanford Central Plateau Cleanup contract. “The model is the Central Plateau contract,” Watmore said.
The Energy Department hopes to make more fee available in exchange for greater emphasis on measurable milestones in that contract. The solicitation is designed to allow vendors “to color outside the lines” and be innovative, she said.
The contractor fee available in the Central Plateau contract will range from zero to 15 percent. Typical fees for similar contracts tend to fall in the 6 to 8 percent range, according to DOE.
These 10-year “end states” the contractor selects could cover decontamination and demolition of structures and waste site remediation; managing transuranic waste; preparing legally mandated documents to support cleanup goals associated with the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement and closure of underground waste storage tanks. The end states selected must speed up the remediation timeline for Hanford while reducing environmental risk and liability, according to the draft RFP.
CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. holds the current 10-year contract valued at $5.8 billion, plus $1.3 billion in Obama administration-era economic recovery work. The company in September received a one-year extension, valued at $500 million, through fiscal 2019 to give DOE more time to award the follow-on agreement.
Watmore was asked whether significant tweaks in procurement could lead to more bid protests. The Office of Environmental Management over the past year has dealt with protests to at least two contracts, including the multibillion-dollar award for liquid waste management at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. In each case, DOE then re-evaluated all submitted bids, though the outcomes so far remain unknown.
“We don’t want a protest,” and DOE can reduce the chances of protests, Watmore said: “We must be clear on what we are looking for and be clear on how we evaluate you.” There cannot be any “hidden” evaluation criteria, she said.
Environmental Management is looking at how it will evaluate proposals under the new procurement approach. Contractors obviously don’t want to start out under one set of assumptions about DOE expectations for a project only years later to lose significant fee over a misunderstanding, Watmore said.
The cleanup office has studied Department of Defense procurements in weighing changes to its own practices. Likewise, any DOE contracting overhaul must be written in such a way that is understandable to Congress, and can be defended there, Watmore said.
