The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management intends to issue no-bid business to Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas to relocate containers of long-stranded transuranic waste to a new above-ground storage area at the commercial waste site.
“The estimated value of the resulting order is not expected to exceed $16,500,000 ($16.5 million),” DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center said in a sole-source notice on Thursday. “The anticipated Period of Performance is 18 months from the date of award.”
The sole-source notice was published in the July 13 online federal procurement system for award management (sam.gov).
The work involves “storage and staging for loading” of the transuranic waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that was rerouted to Waste Control Specialists nine years ago due to the February 2014 underground radiation accident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in February 2014. Some of the containers that ended up at Andrews County were found to share traits with the Los Alamos drum that overheated in the underground salt mine.
Last month, DOE told the Texas attorney general’s office that the federal agency plans to move 74 standard waste boxes of problematic transuranic waste out of the Waste Control Specialists Site in West Texas by the end of 2026. Before that happens, however, the containers must be moved from the site’s Federal Waste Facility to a to a new radiological control enclosure, where the waste will be prepared for ultimate shipment to the underground disposal site near Carlsbad, N.M.
