The Department of Energy’s Fluor-led cleanup contractor for the Portsmouth Site in Ohio pocketed 93%, or $14 million, of $15 million in overall available fees in the second half of fiscal 2022, according to a scorecard released by the agency Dec. 28.
Fluor‐BWXT Portsmouth took home all of the available $10.54 million in performance-based fees between March 29 and Sept. 30, 2022 and $3.5 million out of an available $4.5 million of its subjective fee for the period.
The subjective fee take for these six months, as judged by DOE’s Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office, was not radically different from the 12-month period ended March 28, 2022, when Fluor-BWXT won 82% of its subjective fee but only 75% of its total potential fee.
The big milestone for Fluor-BWXT in the 2022 fiscal year was the long-awaited structural demolition of the X-326 processing building at Portsmouth, DOE said. Also, soil and debris placement at the new On-Site Waste Disposal Facility resumed during the six-month period after a winter suspension, according to DOE.
Built in the 1950s, the half-mile-long X-326 is the first of three mammoth uranium enrichment process buildings to come down at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant property. There have been various delays over the years, but DOE now aims to get all three structures down by 2030.
There were problems “in the ongoing characterization effort for the second process building, processing of tube bundles for disposition, and defective shipping containers,” DOE said, “but several issues have been resolved and the contractor continues to implement corrective actions.”
The DOE Office of Environmental Management is evaluating competitive bids for a follow-on contract to Fluor-BWXT. The incumbent has a potential $4.6-billion agreement that started March 2011 and is scheduled to run through March 28.
