Although about 30% of the 1,050-person workforce at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina can qualify for retirement over the next three years, the research facility will grow before 2030, a lab manager said at an industry conference in Knoxville, Tenn., this week.
The lab, which largely focuses on technology development for nuclear-weapons cleanup and local National Nuclear Security Administration projects such as tritium harvesting, should make upwards of 400 new hires over the next three years, largely to replace retirees, Sharon Marra, deputy director of the laboratory at the Savannah River Site, said in a virtual presentation to the Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association’s (ETEBA) annual Business Opportunities and Technical Conference. Roughly 300 of the existing lab staff qualify for retirement over the next three years, she said.
In December 2020, Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) became an independently managed facility and split off from the Savannah River Site’s management and operations contract. Battelle Savannah River Alliance, which employs Marra, got the lab contract, which with five years of firm money and five one year options could be worth $3.8 billion or so over 10 years.
When the group took over SRNL in June, people said it was like “a college student who is moving out of their parents’ home,” Marra said.
Now that it is on its own, SRNL is standing up its own business operations in areas like human resources and information technology, Marra said.
The laboratory will grow and could even double in size during this decade, Marra said. “It is not out of the question … and what is more important than the size is the impact,” Marra said.
Both Marra and Polk cited the lab’s Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative, a 70,000 square-feet industrial research center that will be built by North Wind and located nearby at the University of South Carolina-Aiken. Design work is underway on the facility, which should be built by fiscal 2024.
In addition, SRNL announced last month that it opened a cyber security laboratory at the Georgia Cyber Center in downtown Augusta, Ga., the lab’s first facility on the Georgia side of the line. The Georgia location will enable Savannah River National Laboratory to work more closely with entities such as Army Cyber Command, the Defense Digital Service of the Department of Defense and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Cyber Crime Center.
The Battelle-led team has five regional universities as key subcontractors: Clemson University, Georgia Tech, South Carolina State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of South Carolina. The alliance’s management and operations contract with DOE is unique given the partnership role with South Carolina State University, a historically black college or university, Marra said.
About 70% of the lab’s employees live in South Carolina with the rest residing in Georgia, Marra said.
Long-term Security Provider Remains Unclear at Savannah River
Although Knoxville is less than a half-hour drive from the DOE’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, this week’s ETEBA conference included ample discussion of the Savannah Site, the agency’s other big nuclear weapons cleanup in the southeast.
On Wednesday, the conference’s opening day, Angela Watmore, acting deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and project management, told the gathering the agency still had not settled on a future security provider for the site along the South Carolina-Georgia line.
Without naming names, Watmore indicated the award of a potential $1-billion, 10-year contract in February to a Securitas CIS-led joint venture was contested and DOE would need to take “corrective action” – essentially verifying what a source told Weapons Complex Monitor last month.
The procurement official did not offer any details on what this corrective action might be or when it might be taken. The DOE’s nuclear cleanup office is devoutly mum when it comes to anything connected with a contract dispute.
This will be the second time the DOE has reviewed issuance of the award to SRS Critical Infrastructure Security (SCIS) team led by Virginia-based Securitas CIS. After the first reconsideration, DOE revealed in June it was sticking with the Securitas CIS team.
In August the Government Accountability Office formally dismissed a bid protest by the incumbent security services provider, Centerra. The aforementioned source said the Centerra protest was basically immaterial because DOE would take a corrective action, perhaps re-evaluating its award.
An earlier protest by SOC, a Day & Zimmermann security business, was withdrawn from the GAO docket in July. While the protests have been going on, DOE issued another extension with Centerra, which otherwise would have been off the job today, Oct. 8.
There was no word of a formal extension by deadline. Centerra has been providing security for people, facilities, nuclear material and cyber secrets at Savannah River since October 2009 and the value of the contract is currently a little more than $1 billion.
