The Department of Energy’s Huntington Ingalls-led legacy cleanup team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is being extended for another three years, a company official told a federal advisory board meeting this week.
Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) “was recently notified that DOE will exercise the first option period under our contract which is a three-year agreement that will take us through April 2026,” said Brad Smith, the company’s acting executive officer. Smith made the announcement Wednesday during a meeting of the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board.
The five-year base period of N3B’s $1.75-billion legacy cleanup contract would run out at the end of next month without the extension.
During his brief presentation to the citizens board, Smith said N3B has issued its second stop-work order over safety concerns connected with digging up corrugated metal pipes at Los Alamos. The earlier stop-work order was implemented on Jan. 26 and lifted Feb. 10.
“Currently N3B is in a stop-work action as of last Saturday,” March 11, Smith said. The contractor is working on “slope angles in the pit” where the corrugated metal pipes are being dug up, he said.
The company is doing fact-finding and “bringing in subject matter expertise,” to address questions raised by DOE and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
In response to a question from a board member, the head of DOE’s Office of Environmental Management field office for Los Alamos, Michael Mikolanis, said neither the feds nor N3B are satisfied with the safety climate.
When asked why N3B was being awarded most of its subjective fee in light of the safety outages, Mikolanis said the fee scorecard in question was for fiscal 2022, while the stop work orders occurred in fiscal 2023. The safety concerns will factor into the contractor’s subjective fee next time around, the DOE manager added.
