Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
10/30/2015
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. – The Los Alamos National Laboratory legacy cleanup contract is expected to be awarded next year, and will most likely yield the winning prime contractor or prime team approximately $150 million-$180 million annually, Jack Surash, deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and project management for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, said at ExchangeMonitor’s Decisionmakers’ Forum last week. Oversight for LANL cleanup is shifting from the National Nuclear Security Administration to EM, which in September awarded LANL management and operations contractor Los Alamos National Security a one-year cost-plus-award-fee “bridge” contract with a maximum value of $309.8 million and two six-month options. When the bridge ends, DOE will have separate contracts for M&O and legacy nuclear cleanup at Los Alamos.
Prior to awarding the bridge contract, EM had considered fixed-price work and small-business set-asides before deciding to move forward with a sole-source bridge contract, a transitional vehicle connecting LANS’ M&O contract with the to-be-awarded LANL cleanup contract. LANL cleanup efforts are aimed at clearing legacy waste produced from years of nuclear weapons testing at the site, and at related environmental remediation efforts. One of the more recently completed activities, announced last spring, was a soil cleanup on the steep slope side of the Los Alamos Canyon.
EM moved forward on the bridge, in part, to give the office more time to hammer out the details of the long-term LANL remediation agreement. “Basically, we said we’re going to move forward with a single follow-on contract, and our intent is to get a draft out and have proposals due and awarded by 2016” for a full cleanup contract, Surash said during a presentation at the conference. Later during his speech, he added: “We hope in the meantime to get more focus, more efficiency, more actual work accomplished, because we have our own contract for LANS, and then we hope to bring in the best team in the world that comes forward for a follow-on activity there, and really take things up another notch.”
Surash said EM “for years” has not gained as much value through NNSA’s M&O contracts for the lab as he would have liked. “The situation at Los Alamos was that, quite frankly, for years, the Office of Environmental Management had not been receiving value with the way work was getting done,” he said. “Essentially, our money went to NNSA, and NNSA passed the money to the lab’s M&O contractor. But the focus of the lab M&O contract was not environmental cleanup. The focus is the NNSA mission. Our $150-$200 million paled in comparison to the total value of the contract, which I think was in excess of a billion dollars. We didn’t feel we were getting focus or getting value." Not divulging specifics, Surash said he’s not “totally happy” with what’s in the bridge contract, but he added that LANS did not get everything it wanted in the transitional agreement, either, as both parties compromised.
NNSA did not respond to a request for comment this week, but referred questions to EM, which in an emailed statement said: “The transition of responsibility for the remaining legacy cleanup at Los Alamos to EM from NNSA is expected to enable increased efficiencies in the environmental cleanup and increased integration with other EM operations. These changes will also enable the LANL M&O contractor, LANS, to strengthen its focus on the core national security missions at the site.”
