The Energy Department last week said it plans up to yearlong extensions to existing contracts at the Hanford Site in Washington state for management of underground tank waste and laboratory testing services.
Washington River Protection Solutions’ (WRPS) long-term contract, now valued at about $7.8 billion, could be extended to Sept. 30, 2021, according to a DOE notice July 1 notice on a government procurement website. The contractor is a joint venture of Amentum and Atkins.
In May, the Energy Department selected a team led by BWX Technologies to succeed the WRPS team through a potential $13 billion, 10-year tank closure contract. Bid protests were promptly filed with the Government Accountability Office by a Jacobs-led group and an Atkins-Amentum joint venture. The GAO is expected to rule on those protests in September.
In a separate notice on the same day, DOE announced plans to extend Veolia’s contract to provide analysis and testing services at Hanford’s 222-S Laboratory from its scheduled Sept. 21, 2020, expiration to Sept. 20, 2021. Wastren Advantage, acquired by Veolia in January 2018, started work on the original $52 million contract in September 2015. The vendor tests sludge and liquid waste from Hanford’s tank farms to evaluate conditions inside the vessels, and also helps support industrial hygiene and groundwater monitoring at the site.
Last week’s procurement notices did not specify potential values of the contract extensions for WRPS and Veolia. The Energy Department usually does not publish such figures until contract extensions are formally issued.
The laboratory does a variety of other testing to gauge contamination levels of soil, building material, and other substances around the Hanford complex.
The 222-S Laboratory is a 70,000-square-foot analytical facility located in Hanford’s 200 West Area. Washington River Protection Solutions runs the facility as part of its contract to manage Hanford’s 177 underground waste tanks.
The Energy Department took bids last April for a single vendor that would run the lab and manage testing. A contract has not been awarded.
The potential one-year delay before a new vendor is selected for the full-scale laboratory contract is setback for organizations that bid on the business and will have to keep key personnel earmarked for the job until then, one industry source said Wednesday.
Some of the vendors believed to be pursuing the business are Los Alamos Technical Associates/Veolia, North Wind, Navarro Research and Engineering, and ARS International, the source said.
New Hanford Contractors Still Waiting for DOE Green Light
Although they withstood bid protests in April, winners of two multibillion-dollar contracts at the Hanford Site still have not received DOE notices to proceed to the jobs.
Neither Hanford’s new support services contractor, nor the new contractor for cleanup of the Central Plateau, have gotten the go-ahead yet, an agency spokesman confirmed this week. The spokesperson declined to elaborate on when that might happen.
In December, the Energy Department awarded a potential 10-year, $4 billion contract to Hanford Mission Integration Solutions (HMIS), a joint venture comprised of Leidos, Centerra, and Parsons. It will take over from services provider Mission Support Alliance.
A Huntington Ingalls Industries-led team that bid on the work appealed in January to the Government Accountability Office, which in April dismissed the matter.
Hanford Mission Integration Solutions normally would have been issued a notice to proceed with the 120-day transition soon after the GAO ruling, industry sources said. But, like so many other things these days, the turnover has been slowed by concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Likewise, DOE has yet to approve the transition for Central Plateau Cleanup Co., a team of Amentum, Fluor, and Atkins, which won its potential 10-year, $10 billion contract in December and subsequently withstood a bid protest.
Transitions usually involve in-person meetings between representatives of the incoming and outgoing vendors, sources say. They can also entail large meetings with groups of workers who are moving from one employer to another, as well as walk-around inspections of site property.
To an extent, technology can compensate for the lack of in-person communication during the transition, sources add.
Hanford, like most nuclear cleanup sites, cut back to a skeleton crew on-site from late March until late May, with most people either working remotely or collecting paid leave. It remains in Phase 1 of DOE’s restart of operations – which involves gradually calling back small groups of people either holding key positions or doing low-risk work on-site.
Sources doubt a transition notice will be issued until staffing gets closer to more normal levels at the 11,000-person environmental remediation complex.
For its part, the DOE Office of Environmental Management remains extremely tight-lipped about any timeline.
The HMIS vendor will play a site-wide landlord role at Hanford, with tasks ranging from security and emergency services, to recordkeeping, to managing the Hazardous Materials Management and Emergency Response (HAMMER) Federal Training Center.
Central Plateau Cleanup, which succeeds Jacobs subsidiary CH2M, will handled decommissioning and demolition of facilities, along with preventing contamination from reaching the Columbia River.
