The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management still has much work to do on its end state contracting model in order to truly drive nuclear cleanup projects toward completion, according to a National Academy of Sciences report released Monday.
The Environmental Management (EM) office should set up results on intermediate end state milestones midway through its 10-year nuclear remediation contracts, an ad hoc National Academies panel recommended.
The DOE nuclear cleanup office has used the end state approach to award contracts over the past year for remediation work at properties including the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, according to the report.
The EM office has touted the end state model, and its emphasis on indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity task orders, as an antidote to its previous management and operations model, which relied on 10-year work plans that took a long time to draw up. The DOE office says end states offer a nimbler approach where work plans take less time to draft and contractors are picked based in part on a small number of task orders at the outset.
But the National Academy panel on the effectiveness of defense environmental cleanup found the end state model is not quite a silver bullet. Many of the features that led to completion of the Fernald site in Ohio and the Rocky Flats plutonium plant in Colorado are not present in the end state model, according to the report.
The end state model is neither “outcomes-based or completion-focused,” according to the report.
It appears EM has swapped a sometimes outdated 10-year scope of work with one having to rely on an “unwieldy number of task orders,” according to the report.
The report suggests other steps designed to drive cleanup jobs toward completion, such as using best management practices for large projects.
The report also suggests EM improve the way it awards fees, which currently offers few guidelines to distinguish between “objective” and “subjective” ratings. Subjective ratings should be used only when objective ratings are not feasible, the National Academy panel said.
The National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 instructed the National Academy to study the DOE nuclear cleanup office’s project oversight efforts. The 123-page document released Monday is the first phase of a two-part report.
