On April 30, Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) hit the one-year mark as the cleanup vendor for legacy waste at the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico.
N3B is tasked with environmental remediation at the 34-square-mile federal property, along with preparing radioactive waste for disposal off-site. It sent the first shipment of defense transuranic waste from the lab’s Area G to the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in over four years, the contractor said in a May 1 press release.
Together with its subcontractors, N3B has a 600-person workforce. It awarded $41 million in procurements over the year, 82% of which went to small businesses.
During its first year, N3B sent six shipments of contact-handled TRU waste to WIPP; shipped another 435 cubic meters of waste off-site; completed 15 milestones under a longstanding consent order on cleanup with the state of New Mexico, and started 10 other remediation campaigns under the same settlement. The contractor also collected more than 4,100 samples of air, soil, and water for testing.
“We established a new company from scratch, completed several projects, resumed waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and laid the foundation for our goal of cleaning up the environment and protecting our future,” said N3B President Glenn Morgan in the press release.
The joint venture, owned by a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, and BWX Technologies, holds the 10-year, $1.38 billion contract at LANL. It replaced former incumbent Los Alamos National Security (LANS), which is also the former management and operations contractor at the nuclear-weapon lab.
In January, N3B earned roughly $2.4 million, or about 83%, of a potential $2.9 million in DOE fee for the period from April 30 through Sept. 30, 2018.
