The Department of Energy on Wednesday kicked off a long-awaited procurement of the next Savannah River Site management and operations contract with a request for information from industry about the award that will fund the Aiken, S.C., facility’s biggest nuclear-weapons programs.
The agency will sort out the value, duration, and exact form of the contract after hearing back from industry. The pact will replace the contract now held by the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), which is set to expire Sept. 30, 2021 and has only a single, one-year option left, after that. That deal, first awarded in 2008 and since extended, is worth a little less than $15 billion.
According to DOE’s request for information, the follow-on management and operations contract will include many of the activities covered in incumbent SRNS’ current contract: landlord duties such as maintenance and building operations, cybersecurity, a limited amount of solid-waste cleanup, and transuranic waste compliance.
Those interested in the work should reply to DOE’s request for information by 3 p.m. Eastern time on Aug. 26, according to the request for information. Among many other things, DOE wants industry to weigh in with ideas about contract structure and the potential for doing some work under fixed-price agreements.
The next site-management accord, though, will not include management of the Savannah River National Laboratory. The DOE Office of Environmental Management, which owns Savannah River, is splitting lab management into its own 10-year contract, worth nearly $4-billion. The agency solicited bids for that contract in late June and expects to award the deal some time after Oct. 1. Bids are due Aug. 10.
Even with the revenue from the national lab excised from the landlord contract, a deal this large has a scent strong enough to bring every defense-nuclear-capable contractor to the yard, one industry source said. According to this person, the major players around the DOE complex have been sizing one another up as potential teammates or competitors on the Savannah River management and operations contract since early in the year.
Among the big DOE nuclear contractors are: Amentum, the former AECOM Management Services; Atkins; Bechtel National; BWX Technologies; Honeywell, Fluor; Huntington Ingalls Industries; and Jacobs.
The companies have competed intensely for DOE contracts over the last year, with a focus on the Hanford Site in Washington state. A team led by Amentum in late 2019 landed the potential $10 billion, 10-year award for continued cleanup at the Central Plateau for the former plutonium production complex. This spring, the contract withstood a protest to the Government Accountability Office from a Bechtel-headed venture. The notice to proceed to the new vendor, though, has been slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
BWX Technologies and Fluor headed the team that in May took the $13 billion radioactive waste Tank Closure Contract at Hanford, which the Energy Department now appears to be reconsidering. There were to separate protests to that deal –one from a bidding group comprised of Atkins, Amentum, and Westinghouse, and the other apparently consisting of Jacobs, Honeywell, and Perma-Fix Environmental Services – but the GAO dismissed them at the Energy Department’s request, while it determines the path forward.
Meanwhile, Atkins, BWXT, Fluor, Jacobs, Amentum, and others are all competing for slices of a $3 billion contract for deactivation, decommissioning, and removal jobs at DOE sites around the nation.
The new management and operations contract will make Savannah River the administrative nexus of the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program that has replaced the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) means of permanently deweaponizing 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium via the dilute-and-dispose method: chemically weakening the plutonium, converting it to an oxide, blending it with an inert mixture, and shipping it off to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for deep-underground burial.
The planned contract also would cover the NNSA’s other nonproliferation missions at the Savannah River Site, including disposal of spent nuclear fuel, and other nuclear material, both from the U.S. and other countries. The current contract covers about 6,000 employees.
The Energy Department tried to start competition for the next Savannah River Site management and operations contract years ago. The Office of Environmental Management began officially planning for the procurement way back in 2016, then scrapped its progress in early 2019 amid talks with the NNSA about the near- and long-term national defense needs at the site. With most cleanup slated to wrap up in the middle of this century, the NNSA could conceivably take over the site, one day.
