A decades’ worth of cleanup work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which including options is valued at $1.7 billion, is officially out for bids, the agency’s Office of Environmental Management announced late Wednesday.
The work entails cleaning up Cold War-era waste, both toxic and radioactive, scattered throughout the sprawling, 36-square-mile LANL campus. Big caches of radioactive equipment and material known as transuranic waste are covered under the deal, as is cleanup of a chromium plume that has contaminated LANL soil.
The cost-plus-award-fee deal kicks in Oct. 1, 2017, and includes a five-year base period, a three-year options, and two-year option.
In 2015, DOE announced it would bid out the cleanup work held by Los Alamos National Security — which also manages the lab’s defense nuclear weapon activity for the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration — following, among other things, the 2014 radiation release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., which was blamed on a container of LANL waste that was not packaged properly. DOE then awarded Los Alamos National Security a short-term contract, worth $310 million and set to expire Sept.30, 2017, to keep cleanup going while the agency worked on the solicitation just released.
Los Alamos National Security is a conglomerate that includes Bechtel National and the University of California. Bechtel was among the companies that registered for a March 2015 industry day at LANL that well predated the release of a draft solicitation for the next round of legacy cleanup work at Los Alamos. However, the company did not show up for a presolicitation conference at LANL in June.
According to a DOE cost estimate last revised in August, remaining legacy waste cleanup at LANL will cost up to $4 billion and possibly take until 2040 to complete. Some of that work is beyond the scope of the contract just put out to bid.
