General Atomics appeared a lock to once again win a contract, potentially worth more than $125 million over five years, to help the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) simulate conditions of a nuclear explosion.
The San Diego-based company is the incumbent on the work under a nearly $150-million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract awarded in 2012 and set to expire Friday. Responses to NNSA’s pre-solicitation notice about the follow-on were due Monday: five days before the current deal is set to lapse.
Under the new pact, General Atomics would provide the NNSA with so-called Inertial Confinement Fusion capsule targets: millimeter-sized objects that are bombarded with “intense energy fluxes,” under which “the target material is driven to conditions of extreme densities, pressures, and temperatures comparable to those encountered in nuclear weapon events,” the NNSA said in a sources sought notice published in July.
Data from these experiments helps maintain the potency of the U.S. nuclear arsenal without resorting to underground nuclear detonations, the agency said.
General Atomics will get a sole-source award. The NNSA found no other viable contractors during due diligence conducted earlier this year, the agency said in a procurement note, though one other company was interested in the work.
The NNSA did not identify that company in the justification for other than full and open competition posted in August, writing that “only General Atomics, Inc. demonstrated full capability to meet the requirements of the work.”
The NNSA’s Office of Inertial Confinement Fusion manages the contract set to go to General Atomics. The work is performed at: the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California; Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico; University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics in New York; and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.
