The Department of Energy will not again extend a contract with a joint venture of APTIM and North Wind Group to finish building a mercury treatment facility at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, an agency spokesperson confirmed Monday.
The contract, which began in December 2018 and is now valued at $128-million, will not be extended beyond the Christmas day expiration date, a DOE spokesperson told Exchange Monitor by phone. When awarded, the four-year, $92-million deal called for a facility that would be ready to treat mercury-laden water in 2022. The pact was extended more than once.
Two industry executives told the Monitor earlier in the afternoon, DOE was displeased with the rate of progress and decided not to stick with the APTIM team.
With the joint venture’s contract ending, responsibility for completing the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility will transfer to the site prime, Amentum-led United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR). The UCOR team also includes Jacobs and Honeywell.
A third industry executive said DOE’s split with the APTIM-North Wind team has been in the works for some time, and the project’s transition to UCOR is well underway.
There has been “a lot of finger-pointing” between the APTIM-led team and the federal agency over the blame for slower-than-anticipated progress on the mercury treatment plant, two of the industry sources said.
As envisioned by DOE, the project is supposed to be the centerpiece of the Office of Environmental Management’s mercury cleanup efforts at Oak Ridge and the Y-12 National Security Complex. It would prevent mercury releases into a nearby creek and include a headworks facility linked by a mile-long pipe to a treatment plant.
But the APTIM-North Wind team ran into geologic problems early on during foundation construction, the Government Accountability Office said in a May 2022 report on big DOE infrastructure projects. “[T]he contractor found that the bedrock was closer to the surface than estimated, which required a redesign of certain elements of the project,” according to the report. “Construction at the headworks facility also produced more contaminated water than was initially estimated and a temporary water treatment system had to be added to the project scope.”
In spring of 2022, DOE said the project was about 40% complete.
APTIM and North Wind representatives did not immediately reply to emails for comment.
