The Energy Department’s Office of River Protection expects the workload will increase significantly during the next contract period at the 222-S Laboratory at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The Office of Environmental Management on July 30 issued a draft request for proposals (RFP) for a potential seven-year, $904 million contract for analytical work, testing, and research services at the 222-S Laboratory.
The incumbent contract, held by Veolia subsidiary Wastren Advantage, ends on Sept. 20, 2020. The lab currently provides about 25,000 analyses per year of tank waste samples to evaluate tank closure and tank corrosion issues at Hanford.
That should jump to roughly 35,000 annually once the pretreatment systems for the site’s Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste process is operational, DOE said in information posted last week on a procurement website.
The treatment of low-activity waste (LAW) is a big step toward converting much of the 56 million gallons of mostly liquid chemical and radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass-like substance. Prime contractor Bechtel had originally planned to process low-activity and high-activity waste simultaneously but now plans to go with a sequenced approach, starting with low-activity material.
Tank waste samples will be tested before being fed into the LAW pretreatment facility at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant. Under a federal court mandate, DOE must start treating LAW by 2023; however, it intends to actually begin converting the material for disposal by the end of 2021.
The chief customer for the 222-S analysis will be the tank farm manager, currently Washington River Protection Solutions, DOE said in the procurement material.
Wastren tests highly radioactive samples from the tanks to analyze their organic, inorganic, and radio-chemistry composition to assist in tank-to-tank transfers and tank closures.
Wastren has about 56 employees involved in its lab-analysis contract, issued in September 2015 and valued at about $44.7 million.
Industry meetings on the draft RFP are taking place this week. The department has set a Sept. 7 deadline for parties to submit feedback on the draft RFP.
