Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
4/25/2014
The Department of Energy has asked the two teams bidding on the new Paducah deactivation contract to submit best-and-final offers, with responses due in early May. DOE is believed to be seeking “final proposal revisions” from the teams of Fluor-CB&I-LATA and AECOM-Stoller-Newport News to help resolve discrepancies between the two bidders’ scope assumptions and pricing and allow for a more equitable comparison of proposals. The request could also give the Fluor-led team a chance to make changes to its proposed key personnel—a move that may be necessary, in part, due to Fluor’s recent win of a new contract in the United Kingdom to manage and decommission the U.K.’s Magnox nuclear power stations and two research sites as part of Cavendish Fluor Partnership. The DOE Office of Environmental Management declined to comment on the matter this week.
The new Paducah deactivation task order, which is being competed under DOE’s set of national Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity cleanup contracts, is set to run for three years and be worth several hundred million dollars. Work to be performed under the task order will include facility deactivation, surveillance and maintenance and utility operations; deactivation, decontamination and demolition; the construction of an on-site disposal waste facility; and post-Gaseous Diffusion Plant shutdown cleanup activities.
Earlier this month, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said DOE is looking to award the new Paducah contract in September—a schedule largely on track with the Department’s forecast for an award with discussions. “We are working to try and speed up the contract discussions. Typically these large environmental management contracts, they’re complicated, they’re very long term, they have very very large contract amounts, they are 12 to 14 months. We are hoping to get that down to a little bit shorter so that we can have that turnover early in the fall,” Moniz said at a hearing held by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing, adding: “September is what we are trying to push for to get that contract concluded.”
