Just before Christmas, and months after two losing teams protested the award, the Department of Energy canned a $13-billion liquid-waste cleanup contract awarded in May to a BWX Technologies-led team.
In a Dec. 23 memo to Hanford employees, DOE said it scrapped the Tank Closure Contract because it wants to combine that work — emptying and closing Hanford’s 177 underground tanks of liquid radioactive waste — with the direct-feed, low-activity waste campaign scheduled to solidify the less-radioactive tank waste into stable, glass-like cylinders starting by 2023.
With the prized award again a jump ball, Amentum-led incumbent Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) will stay on at the Hanford tank farms in eastern Washington state until Sept. 30, 2021, or until DOE picks a new provider to manage and ultimately close the tanks at the former plutonium production complex.
DOE announced its industry-shaking decision in a memo emailed to all employees at the agency’s Richland Operations Office and the Office of River Protection at Hanford.
The government’s move simultaneously ends and prolongs uncertainties surrounding the next big liquid-waste cleanup contract at Hanford, where active DOE-led remediation efforts are expected by the agency’s own account to last into the late 2070s.
According to DOE’s pre-Christmas memo, the agency cancelled the Tank Closure solicitation after considering “changes in the tank closure and related direct-feed low-activity waste missions that have occurred at Hanford since the solicitation was originally issued in 2019” and deciding that “it was beneficial to integrate the direct-feed low-activity waste mission with the tank closure mission.”
Previously, DOE planned to hire a separate contractor to handle direct-feed low-activity waste work at the Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant being built by Bechtel National. The agency even launched a procurement website for the envisioned low-activity waste contract, though it never published so much as a request for information about the work.
In May, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management awarded the now cancelled Tank Closure contract to Hanford Works Restoration: a BWX Technologies-led team with Texas-based companies Fluor and Intera, plus Richland, Wash.-based DBD.
Shortly afterward, two losing bidders filed challenges with the Government Accountability Office days after the award: the Hanford Tank Closure Co. team of Atkins, Amentum and Westinghouse, and the Tank Closure Partnership team rumored to be led by Jacobs. Atkins and Amentum are part of the Hanford liquid-waste incumbent.
So, in July the DOE put the Tank Closure contract award on hold while it parsed the issues raised in the bid protests.
The Atkins-Amentum-Westinghouse team argued Hanford Works Restoration “created the appearance of impropriety and/or obtained an unfair competitive advantage by hiring the former manager of DOE’s Richland Office to assist in preparing” its bid proposal, according to a GAO document. Sources identified the recently-retired Hanford official as Doug Shoop.
In calling off the contract award last week, DOE made no mention of the alleged conflict of interest in the BWXT-led team’s proposal.
“BWXT is disappointed in this decision, but we remain committed to supporting the DOE’s critical environmental management mission going forward,” company spokesman Jud Simmons said in a Tuesday email. Atkins and Amentum representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.
The decades-old underground tanks at Hanford are leak-prone and Washington state officials worry more leaks will spring before the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant starts processing the high-activity waste in the tanks: something that is supposed to start in 2036, under a consent decree handed down by a federal judge in 2016. However, DOE has acknowledged it probably will not meet that legally binding deadline. The agency and Washington State are engaged in what they describe as “holistic” talks about that and other Hanford issues.
