The Energy Department picked up the last two options on the stopgap legacy cleanup contract it awarded to Los Alamos National Security (LANS) last year, keeping the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s chastened prime as lead cleanup contractor there for another year at a cost of roughly $155 million.
The department announced the move in a Wednesday press release. The contract phased in on Oct. 1, 2015, and was set to expire on Sept. 30. A pair of six-month options will keep the work going at the New Mexico Facility until Sept. 30, 2017, according to the release. The total value of the pact is nearly $310 million.
The major partners in LANS are Bechtel Corp. of San Francisco and the University of California. AECOM of Los Angeles and BWX Technologies of Lynchburg, Va., are the other partners.
LANS’ lab prime contract runs through Sept. 30, 2018. In 2015, the year after a LANS subcontractor was blamed for a radioactive leak in the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Calsbad, N.M., DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration split legacy waste cleanup work out of the site’s management and operations contract. Waste generated by ongoing nuclear weapons activities at the lab remain the responsibility of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Cleanup of legacy nuclear waste at the sprawling Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was then turned over to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, which quickly cut a bridge contract with LANS and began work on a new prime cleanup pact. In June, EM unveiled a draft solicitation for the follow-on LANL remediation deal, which is expected to ring in at more than $1.5 billion over 10 years.
