Mid-America Conversion Services earned just under $1.1 million in award fees for eight months of work on depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio and Paducah Site in Kentucky, according to the contractor’s recently released performance scorecard. That was just under half of the $2.3 million available for fiscal 2017.
Mid-America earned $468,261, or about 70 percent of a potential $676,189 for its subjective performance categories from Feb. 1 through Sept. 30, 2017. It took home $629,986, or roughly 40 percent of a potential $1.58 million in performance-based incentives for the period.
On the subjective performance categories, Mid-America rated “satisfactory” for schedule and cost control, “good” on quality and regulatory compliance, “very good” in management, and “excellent” for utilization of small businesses.
“MCS’s ability to estimate the time needed to complete work, schedule the work and then manage to the established schedule is a weakness,” DOE said in the scorecard. “During the last quarter of this fiscal year, at best, only three out of the four lines were operating at any given time.”
Also, MCS’s actual costs in fiscal 2017 exceeded the spending plan, although the scorecard did not say by how much. The contractor was slow in submitting certain requests for an equitable adjustment, which hindered cost control, the scorecard says. However, DOE credited MCS for taking “aggressive action” to minimize the overrun, noting the company reported roughly $1 million in cost savings through use of “e-sourcing,” price negotiations, and certain tax exemptions.
On the performance-based incentives, the contractor only partially met its goals for production and line restart, DOE said. The report card did not offer details on these two items.
Mid-America Conversion Services is a joint venture led by SNC-Lavalin subsidiary Atkins, with partners Westinghouse and Fluor. It won a five-year, $318 million DOE contract in September 2016 to run the DUF6 conversion facilities at the former gaseous diffusion plants at Portsmouth and Paducah.
The DUF6 at the sites is a byproduct of Cold War-era uranium enrichment at the sites. The Energy Department plans by 2032 to convert about 740,000 metric tons of the material into hydrofluoric acid and uranium oxide for reuse or disposal.
