Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B), the vendor in charge of legacy environmental remediation operations at the U.S. Energy Department’s Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in New Mexico, won 84% of its potential fee for work done during fiscal 2019.
Altogether, N3B took home more than $8.6 million of a potential amount exceeding $10.2 million, according to the recently released performance scorecard.
The evaluation lists more than $1.8 million of a potential $3 million award for the subjective fee, and about $6.8 million of a potential $7.2 million on the objective side of the review.
The 84% result closely mirrors the 83% of fee N3B won in a January 2019 scorecard on its first five months of work at Los Alamos, from April 30 through Sept. 30 in 2018.
The N3B joint venture, comprised of Huntington Ingalls Industries subsidiary Stoller Newport News Nuclear (SN3) and BWX Technologies, was awarded the DOE contract worth roughly $1.39 billion in December 2017. It took over from Los Alamos Nuclear Security, which had served as both the legacy cleanup contractor and the operations manager for LANL.
In its latest evaluation, N3B scored “good” on three of five subjective rating categories – management, regulatory compliance, and quality assurance/safety. It was deemed “satisfactory” on schedule and cost control.
“The contractor successfully made significant progress in key legacy cleanup and waste management campaigns, including operating the chromium interim measure and shipping waste off-site,” Doug Hintze, manager of the EM Los Alamos Field Office, said in an agency statement.
The vendor is pumping and injecting treated water to curb the advancement of the contaminant plume and to shrink its size, DOE said this week.
‘Opportunities for improvement” include Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) inspections, as well as the response time in repairing safety systems after failures, according to the document.
The partnership is in charge of cleaning up hundreds of sites, including waste disposal areas and a groundwater chromium plume, as well as shipping transuranic material to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. The disposal site was out of service for about three years after a ruptured drum from Los Alamos resulted in an underground radiation leak in February 2014.
“We are pleased with the work we did in FY 2019 to get waste off the hill and protect the environment. We’re continuously seeking ways to improve our performance and look forward to tackling the legacy waste cleanup challenges ahead,” N3B President Glenn Morgan said in an email statement.
