The Idaho National Laboratory’s cleanup contractor, Fluor Idaho, has been paid $4.1 million in performance award and incentive fees since in June taking over the contracts of CH2M-WG Idaho and Idaho Treatment Group. Fluor will receive its first formal performance report card at the end of fiscal 2017.
The contractor is expected to tally another $2.8 million in fees for 2016 work it has not yet invoiced, said Department of Energy spokeswoman Danielle Miller. Under its contract, Fluor makes monthly invoices to DOE for costs incurred and their associated fee payments. Except for work that qualifies for “fixed fee” payments, the fees paid to Fluor are provisional and subject to a final determination at the end of the fiscal year when the report card is issued. The current budget year ends on Sept. 30.
Fluor was awarded the five-year, $1.4 billion contract in February, beating AECOM. Its responsibilities include cleaning up acres of buried radioactive waste, watching over the site’s spent nuclear fuel stockpiles, and treating some 900,000 gallons of radioactive sodium-bearing waste, leftovers from the processing of spent fuel.
The contractor is nearing the finish at its Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project, where more than 20,000 containers of transuranic waste are set to ship to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in the coming months. Officials late last year said 275 drums and 41 boxes of legacy waste remained to be retrieved, characterized, treated, and packaged.
At the Radioactive Waste Management Complex, officials say they are nearing completion of a new Advanced Retrieval Project enclosure to recover more buried waste. Work to fix the problem-prone Integrated Waste Treatment Unit also continues, including small-scale testing of a key component that began in Colorado this month.
