The Department of Energy missed its self-imposed target to issue a final request for proposals by Sept. 30 for the multibillion-dollar Savannah River Site Management and Operating Contract and now plans to put the deal on the street in October.
The agency made the announcement in a procurement notice posted online Thursday. If the date holds, the final request for proposals for the Savannah River site operations contract — potentially worth $21.5-billion over a decade — would drop the same month as the even larger, $26.5-billion, 10-year liquid waste contract at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
It’s the sort of major acquisitions double header that DOE this summer seemed keen to avoid, according to a senior procurement official for the Office of Environmental Management (EM).
“We know it would be hard for industry to handle,” then-Environmental Management deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and project management, Norbert Doyle, said in June during the online Office of Environmental Management Business Opportunities Forum.
Since then, Doyle has transferred to another government job, a two-year term on the faculty at the National Defense University’s National War College in Washington. Angela Watmore now holds the Environmental Management procurement post on an acting basis.
EM rolled out its draft solicitation for the Savannah River site operations contract in April. The Fluor-led incumbent, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, has been on the job since August 2008. DOE has options on the deal to keep the team in charge of the federal complex along the border with Georgia through September 2022 under an agreement now valued at $15.8 billion. The last extension from DOE was issued in July, said a spokesperson for the contractor.
Meanwhile, the Hanford Integrated Tank Disposition Contract would combine both operations of the Waste Treatment Plant, being built by Bechtel, with the management contract for the 56 million gallons of underground tank waste, now held by Amentum-led Washington River Protection Solutions.
Bechtel has held the contract to build the waste vitrification plant, business valued at $14.7-billion, since December 2000. The agreement was scheduled to sunset in December 2022. Washington River Protection Solutions, the Amentum-Atkins partnership, has held the tank management business since October 2008. That agreement, now valued at nearly $8 billion, was scheduled to expire in September 2023.
Aside from Savannah River and Hanford, Thursday’s procurement update notice from Environmental Management also said DOE hopes to publish final solicitations in January for both the Decontamination and Decommissioning Contract at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio along with the Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride (DUF6) Conversion Operations at Portsmouth and the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
Neither of those solicitations had a release date in June, the last time EM updated its procurement forecast.
Portsmouth-BWXT has been the decontamination contractor at Portsmouth since late March 2011 and is scheduled to stay on through March 28, 2023 under a DOE agreement valued at $4.4-billion, after an extension awarded in March.
Mid-America Conversion Services, a team made up of Atkins, Westinghouse and Fluor, has a five-year, $536-million contract for DUF6 conversion services that runs until January 2022. It oversees facilities that convert DOE’s inventory of DUF6, produced by the former gaseous diffusion plants, to a more stable uranium oxide form for reuse, storage or eventual disposal.
