The Department of Energy on Wednesday kicked off a long-awaited procurement of the next Savannah River Site management and operations contract with a request for information from industry about the award that will fund the Aiken, S.C., facility’s biggest nuclear-weapons programs.
The agency will sort out the value, duration, and exact form of the contract after hearing back from industry. The pact will replace the contract now held by the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), which is set to expire Sept. 30, 2021 and has only a single, one-year option left, after that. That deal, first awarded in 2008 and since extended, is worth a little less than $15 billion.
According to DOE’s request for information, the follow-on management and operations contract will include many of the activities covered in incumbent SRNS’ current contract: landlord duties such as maintenance and building operations, cybersecurity, a limited amount of solid-waste cleanup, and transuranic waste compliance.
Those interested in the work should reply to DOE’s request for information by 3 p.m. Eastern time on Aug. 26, according to the request for information. Among many other things, DOE wants industry to weigh in with ideas about contract structure and the potential for doing some work under fixed-price agreements.
The next site-management accord, though, will not include management of the Savannah River National Laboratory. The DOE Office of Environmental Management, which owns Savannah River, is splitting lab management into its own 10-year contract, worth nearly $4-billion. The agency solicited bids for that contract in late June and expects to award the deal some time after Oct. 1. Bids are due Aug. 10.
The national security motherload on the successor contract to SRNS will be construction and operation of the Savannah River Site’s planned plutonium-pit production plant, the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, and construction of the new tritium harvesting facility, the Tritium Finishing Facility.
The new management and operations contract will also make Savannah River the administrative nexus of the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program that has replaced the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) means of permanently deweaponizing 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium via the dilute-and-dispose method: chemically weakening the plutonium, converting it to an oxide, blending it with an inert mixture, and shipping it off to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for deep-underground burial.
Even with the revenue from the national lab excised from the landlord contract, a deal this large has a scent strong enough to bring every defense-nuclear-capable contractor to the yard, one industry source said. According to this person, the major players around the DOE complex have been sizing one another up as potential teammates or competitors on the Savannah River management and operations contract since early in the year.
Among the big DOE nuclear contractors are: Amentum, the former AECOM Management Services; Atkins; Bechtel National; BWX Technologies; Honeywell, Fluor; Huntington Ingalls Industries; and Jacobs.
The National Nuclear Security Administration plans to make the pit plant out of the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, which officially lost its plutonium-disposal mission for the agency’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation office in 2018. The facility is supposed to cast 50 pits annually by 2030, initially for W87-1 warheads to be used on Ground-Based Strategic Deterrence intercontinental ballistic missiles starting in the next decade.
The planned contract also would cover the NNSA’s other nonproliferation missions at the Savannah River Site, including disposal of spent nuclear fuel, and other nuclear material, both from the U.S. and other countries. The current contract covers about 6,000 employees.
The Energy Department tried to start competition for the next Savannah River Site management and operations contract years ago. The Office of Environmental Management began officially planning for the procurement way back in 2016, then scrapped its progress in early 2019 amid talks with the NNSA about the near- and long-term national defense needs at the site. With most cleanup slated to wrap up in the middle of this century, the NNSA could conceivably take over the site, one day.
