The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management announced Monday it would split the previously single Tank Waste Cleanup Contract at the Hanford Site in Washington state into two solicitations in the follow-on procurement.
Priority will be given to a contract emphasizing closure of radioactive-waste storage tanks and “feed delivery” to the Waste Treatment Plant that Bechtel is building at Hanford. The Energy Department plans to issue a solicitation in the first quarter of this year, according to a DOE notice on FedBizOpps.gov.
The second procurement will cover operation and maintenance of the Waste Treatment Plant, which will convert millions of gallons of radioactive waste into a glass form for disposal. Bechtel is designing, building, and commissioning the plant. The Dec. 31 notice did not list a target time period for issuing the request for proposals for that contract.
In the major Environmental Management procurement schedule posted online in November, DOE said the combined Hanford Tank Waste Cleanup request for proposals was expected sometime from April to June of this year, so the federal agency is moving up the tank closure solicitation by one quarter. The Energy Department had previously targeted award of the earlier version of the tank waste contract in mid-2020. The one-page notice this week does not say when the tank closure contract will actually be issued.
AECOM-led Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) is currently charged with managing 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks at Hanford. In 2018, WRPS received a one-year extension, valued at about $629 million, to its 10-year, $6.3 billion contract at Hanford. The extension keeps WRPS on the job through September 2019.
Under a 2016 federal court order, the Waste Treatment Plant must start treating the site’s low-activity waste by 2023 and its high-level waste by 2036.
The low-activity waste from double-shell tanks will be run through a planned tank-side cesium removal facility prior to being fed to the vitrification plant. The removed cesium will be taken to a storage pad in Hanford. During the summer, WRPS awarded a subcontract to AVANTech to design and build a tank-side pretreatment facility. The project, meant to remove both cesium and solid materials from tank waste, should be operating by December 2023.
The contract separation likely reflects DOE’s shifted emphasis from tank waste management to waste treatment at Hanford, an industry source said by phone Thursday of the New Year’s Eve announcement. More will be known as actual RFPs are issued.
“The split itself is not that big of a deal,” a second industry source said by telephone Thursday. The Energy Department seems to have decided it wants a “tank farm contractor” now and to procure a WTP operator later. The move could be a disappointment for Bechtel if the company had hoped to transition easily from a construction contract to an operations contract for the plant, he added.
Spokesmen from both WRPS and Bechtel declined to comment on the DOE announcement and any future procurement plans by their company at Hanford.
The same source said he was more concerned by DOE’s procedure. The tank closure contract will utilize the end state contract model, as modified by the department on Dec. 12. The procurement for the next Central Plateau cleanup contract at Hanford is the debut for DOE Assistant Secretary for EM Anne Marie White’s effort to offer contractors potentially higher fees for achieving major 10-year milestones or end states.
That modification indicated the agency could use more of an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract approach to meet 10-year remediation goals, by shortening contract preparation and procurement timelines. Industry comments were accepted through Dec. 21. To have the cleanup office then say less than two weeks later its revised approach will guide the Hanford tank contract RFP raises doubt on whether the Energy Department is actually considering industry comments, the source said.
The Energy Department said in the same notice Monday that it could issue in the first three months of 2019 final requests for proposals for contracts on Hanford Central Plateau Cleanup, operation of the Hanford 222-S Laboratory, Nevada Environmental Program Services, and paramilitary services for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The timeline for those solicitations is only one quarter later than what was outlined in the November schedule.
