The U.S. Energy Department appears to be reaching out to all the teams that bid on the $4.7 billion contract to manage liquid waste at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, after the Government Accountability Office last month upheld one protest against the deal, industry sources said this week.
Two industry sources said Thursday DOE officials could meet with representatives of the three partnerships next week in Aiken, S.C. The sources also expected the bidder teams might have to submit more information to DOE soon. The nature and format of the potential talks remain unclear, however.
The department’s Office of Environmental Management declined to comment for this article.
In a redacted version of its Feb. 8 decision, the GAO last month said the Energy Department failed to verify the technical approach for liquid waste processing, put forward by the winning BWX Technologies-Bechtel-Honeywell team, would work. The agency sustained a bid protest brought by a group comprised of AECOM and CH2M while it dismissed a protest from a Fluor-Westinghouse partnership.
“Due to the competitive nature of the contract bid process, Fluor does not publicly provide information on specific pursuits nor the details associated with such prospective opportunities,” Fluor spokesman Brian Mershon said Wednesday by email.
The Energy Department has yet to file any official response on how it plans to address the GAO decision. “Agencies have 65 days to tell us if they have not implemented our recommendations, so it’s still fairly early for an agency response,” a GAO source said Wednesday.
BWXT and Bechtel are partners with CH2M in the AECOM-led liquid waste incumbent, Savannah River Remediation. The contractor remains on the job at least until the end of May following a five-month extension SRR received in December while the protest was being reviewed by GAO. If it needs, DOE can again extend the contract temporarily.
The Savannah River Site today is home to about 36 million gallons of radioactive waste, a byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons production, stored in 43 underground tanks. Since 1997, eight other tanks have been closed.
The bid protest argued the BWXT-led group would significantly depart from prior practices when it comes to the “concentration” of the waste while it is being processed. The AECOM-CH2M group effectively argued DOE had failed to fully consider the viability of the technical approach before it issued the contract in October.
