Hanford Site contractor CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. has earned 95 percent of the available fee for fiscal 2015 and a rating of “excellent,” the Department of Energy announced this week. The contractor, which is responsible for Hanford groundwater and Central Plateau cleanup, earned about $10.6 million of about $10.9 million available. The excellent rating was for “safely and compliantly removing a record amount of contaminants from the groundwater, completing the construction of the building we will use to move radioactive sludge away from the Columbia River, compliantly managing spent nuclear waste and fuels, and removing significant hazards from the Plutonium Finishing Plant,” said John Ciucci, company president, in a statement. The contractor’s evaluation was not quite as good as that for fiscal 2014, when it earned 98 percent of the available fee.
Work at the Plutonium Finishing Plant was mixed in fiscal 2015, with CHPRC pointing to accomplishments there but DOE listing it under significant deficiencies in a summary of the fee award. DOE did not award any additional provisional fee for the plant, but a final evaluation of fee for the plant will be conducted when the site has been demolished, DOE said. The building is required to be demolished by the end of the current fiscal year under a Tri-Party Agreement milestone.
Under significant achievements, DOE said CHPRC had missed no enforceable Tri-Party Agreement milestones in fiscal 2015. CHPRC said it completed 13 milestones, including drilling groundwater wells, certifying 300 cubic meters of certain types of transuranic waste, and completing significant progress on removal of Plutonium Finishing Plant glove boxes and disposal of all the pencil tanks in the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility. DOE also praised CHPRC for accomplishing a number of DOE’s key performance goals for Hanford cleanup. “The contractor was very responsive to customer needs,” DOE said in the summary. In addition to its work at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, the company treated 2.1 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater, CHPRC said. Work was done safely, with injury rates for employees that were much lower than goals for DOE Environmental Management sites, the department said. CHPRC also has had strong performance in small business subcontracting. It has awarded more than $2 billion in contracts to small businesses since 2008.
