NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. — Leveraging resources from U.S. Department of Energy contractors and research universities will be a key part of the inaugural stand-alone management and operations contract for the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), DOE Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar said Thursday.
The Energy Department is planning for a contract that would separate the lab from its traditional operation within the Savannah River Site’s broader management and operations contract. Such a shift would also expand the scope of the laboratory’s mission, which today largely focuses on DOE Environmental Management (EM) nuclear cleanup missions at the 310-square-mile site near Aiken, Dabbar said.
Dabbar spoke briefly with media during Thursday’s industry day for the SRNL contract. More than 150 representatives from various DOE vendors and colleges attended to learn about the potential procurement. One of the main takeaways was that the Energy Department wants to position SRNL to serve a viable purpose long after environmental remediation is complete at Savannah River, which is projected for 2065.
Savannah River is mostly a Cold War liquid-waste cleanup site, with the Office of Environmental Management controlling the largest contracts on site. The site’s national lab already contributes some research to National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) nonproliferation programs and tritium science.
The NNSA also harvests tritium for nuclear weapons at Savannah River, funding the work through the current site management contract held by the Flour-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions. Tritium harvesting would continue under a follow-up contract to that deal, which EM is calling the Integrated Mission Completion Contract. The pact would combine waste cleanup and site management.
Separately, by 2030, the NNSA wants to annually produce 80 plutonium pits, the fissile cores for nuclear weapons, at Savannah River and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Fifty of those, starting in 2030, would come from the planned Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, to be built from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. The remaining 30 would come from the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility in New Mexico, which would begin production in 2024 at 10 pits annually and ramp up to 30 annually by 2026.
Preparing the sites to reach that level of pit production could cost $9 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. One industry day presentation noted that designing and constructing the Savannah River pit plant would require about 2,000 staffers. The lab would be tasked with developing innovative ways to maximize production at the planned facility, which is scheduled to hit its CD-1 milestone — selection of a preferred design — by Sept. 30.
The Energy Department on Dec. 18 issued a notice of intent that the EM office “intends to solicit proposals to operate SRNL under a discrete M&O contract for the Laboratory,” a DOE spokesperson said Friday via email. While it is too early in the process to project award dollars, the spokesperson noted the lab in 2019 executed more than $289 million of work for the Environmental Management Office, the NNSA, and DOE’s Secretarial Offices, among others.
Among the entities that sent representatives to the industry day were AECOM, BWX Technologies, Betchel National, Honeywell, Westinghouse, Clemson University, the University of South Carolina, the University of Georgia, and North Carolina State.
Presentations during the three-and-a-half hour event covered various facets of the proposed contract, including how the department’s Office of Science is “underrepresented” at SRNL, according to Ming Zhu, the senior adviser for laboratory policy at Environmental Management. Zhu said the science office can expand its role at the national lab in several ways, such as assisting in the site’s tritium production mission by studying how to extract the nuclear-weapon material at a higher rate. Research universities would be a big part of that, he added.
Dabbar agreed, though neither her nor Zhu specifically said they want to see research universities as part of the bidding teams for the lab contract. Rather, Dabbar said the skill sets offered by the universities would play a useful role at the lab by providing applied research expertise.
The Savannah River National Laboratory employs about 1,000 people on an annual budget of roughly $200 million. It is the only national laboratory for the Office of Environmental Management, with missions including grouting and vitrification technology for treatment and disposal of nuclear waste. For the NNSA, the lab develops new technology for detecting nuclear and radioactive material.
The company or group that wins the lab contract would be expected to provide technical advice and guidance to DOE in support of policy development, program planning, and other activities under both EM and NNSA.
Dabbar said the lab’s role under Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), is limited compared to what the lab could do on its own. “We’ve been talking with academia about the site potential for quite a bit,” he said. “For flexibility reasons and the focus area, you can see here the number of people interested is very large.”
Following industry day, interested parties are expected to respond to the DOE request for information for the procurement by Jan. 29. The acquisition plan for the contract and the draft request for proposals are expected to be released in the second quarter of 2020. A presolicitation conference will follow, sometime in the third quarter of the year.
From there, it is unclear how long it will take for DOE to select a contractor.
The full Savannah River Site contract has been extended repeatedly since Savannah River Nuclear Solutions’ original 10-year, $9.5 billion deal ended on July 31, 2018. A $1 billion extension of the deal ended in July 2019 and now SRNS is in the middle of a 14-month, $1.5 billion contract that expires on Sept. 30, 2020, with possible back-to-back one-year extensions keeping the company on the job through September 2022.
