The current 30-month option period for Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s $3.4 billion decontamination and decommissioning contract for the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, is scheduled to expire Sept. 30.
While a DOE spokesperson confirmed Tuesday the contract has not been extended beyond Sept. 30, other details were sparse. The Energy Department has not said if it intends to exercise the second and final option.
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth spokesman Jason Lovins directed questions about the contract to the federal agency. The Energy Department did not respond to a question prior to deadline about exercising its next option. The federal agency typically does not comment on procurement issues. No draft request for proposals for a follow-on award has been issued to date.
Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer, an outspoken critic of DOE plans to build an on-site waste disposal cell at Portsmouth, said by telephone Wednesday he has heard speculation Fluor-BWXT might not get the second contract option. “I heard rumors they are out.”
“The chatter is that they are taking a lot of heat” from DOE over progress in remediation of the X-326 process building at Portsmouth, said John Knauff, president of United Steelworkers Local 1-689, which represents Portsmouth cleanup workers.
As recently as 2015, the contractor had expected to put X-326 into “cold and dark” status, a post-shutdown phase of deactivation in which the plant is cut off from electricity and sufficiently remediated that there almost no risk of nuclear criticality, by June 2017. In a planning document issued last year, Fluor-BWXT said X-326 would be completely demolished in 2022; it had once planned to meet that milestone by 2018.
In a March presentation at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix, Fluor-BWXT officials indicated they would reach the “cold and dark” milestone in this calendar year. Spencer said he heard the current target is this fall for the 1950s-era process building built by the Atomic Energy Commission for uranium enrichment work for the nuclear weapons program.
The Fluor-BWX Technologies joint venture assumed the potential 10-year, cost-plus-award fee agreement in March 2011. The Energy Department exercised the first of two potential 30-month options in March 2016. A second option period, if exercised, could run through March 2021. The Energy Department could have issued one five-year option in 2016, but instead elected to go with two 30-month options.
The contractor’s website indicates Fluor-BWXT and its subcontractors together employ over 1,900 workers involved in dismantling and cleaning up 10 million square feet of contaminated structures at the old gaseous diffusion plant complex.
