The Civilian Board of Contract Appeals has ordered the Energy Department to pay an additional $33.2 million to the former prime cleanup contractor for the Idaho Site.
The board said CH2M-WG Idaho is entitled to recover more than $27.3 million in incentive fees for work it did on the Idaho Cleanup Project. In addition, the board said DOE owed the contractor more than $5.9 million under a safety fee program and interest payments dating to March 2014.
The board, however, rejected the CH2M request for an additional $7.9 million in “cost transfers” associated with the Idaho Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU). The facility is intended to process 900,000 gallons of liquid sodium-bearing waste produced during Cold War-era spent fuel reprocessing at the Idaho National Laboratory, but has not yet started operations due to problems with the technology.
At the heart of the contract interpretation dispute was a cost-plus-incentive-fee (CPIF) deal that enabled the contractor team to negotiate some extra work on a “fixed fee” basis. Not long after starting work, CH2M-WG Idaho reallocated some general and administrative (G&A) costs under the cost-plus-incentive provision into the fixed fee part of the contract. The end result allowed the contractor to earn greater fees than DOE had anticipated.
“We conclude that DOE, at its own peril, waited too long to resolve the G&A allocation issue with CWI, both because it was not an issue DOE was contractually allowed to address unilaterally, and because, by the time DOE decided to address the issue, CWI’s position on an equitable adjustment for the G&A allocation issue had changed,” the board said in its Sept. 7 decision.
The Energy Department is reviewing the decision. Under the 1978 Contract Disputes Act, DOE has up to 120 days to seek review before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Fluor in February 2016 was awarded the current Idaho Cleanup Contract, worth $1.4 billion.
Once a naval gunnery range, the Idaho Site has various wastes dating to World War II and Cold War nuclear operations, along with government nuclear power research. Among other things, Fluor Idaho is processing transuranic waste for disposal and finishing retrieval of buried waste.
