Although they withstood bid protests in April, winners of two multibillion-dollar contracts at the Hanford Site in Washington state still have not received Department of Energy notices to proceed to the jobs.
Neither Hanford/s new support services contractor, nor the new contractor for cleanup of the Central Plateau, have gotten the go-ahead yet, an agency spokesman confirmed Monday, declining to elaborate on when that might take place.
In December, the Energy Department awarded a potential 10-year, $4 billion contract to Hanford Mission Integration Solutions (HMIS), a joint venture comprised of Leidos, Centerra, and Parsons. It will take over from services provider Mission Support Alliance.
A Huntington Ingalls Industries-led team that bid on the work appealed in January to the Government Accountability Office, which in April dismissed the matter.
Hanford Mission Integration Solutions normally would have been issued a notice to proceed with the 120-day transition soon after the GAO ruling, industry sources said. But, like so many other things these days, the turnover has been slowed by concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Likewise, DOE has yet to greenlight the transition for Central Plateau Cleanup Co., a team made up of Amentum, Fluor, and Atkins, which won its potential 10-year, $10 billion contract in December, and subsequently withstood an unsuccessful bid protest.
Transitions usually involve in-person meetings between representatives of the incoming and outgoing vendors, sources say. They can also entail large meetings with groups of workers who are moving from one employer to another, as well as walk-around inspections of site property.
To an extent, technology can compensate for the lack of in-person communication during the transition, sources add.
Hanford, like most nuclear cleanup sites, cut back to a skeleton crew on-site from late March until late May, with most people either working remotely or collecting paid leave. It remains in Phase 1 of DOE’s restart of operations – which involves gradually calling back small groups of people either holding key positions or doing low-risk work on-site.
Sources doubt a transition notice will be issued until staffing get closer to more normal levels at the 11,000-person environmental cleanup site.
For its part, the DOE Office of Environmental Management remains extremely tight-lipped about any timeline. The HMIS vendor will play a site-wide landlord role at Hanford, with tasks ranging from from site security and emergency services, to recordkeeping, to managing the Hazardous Materials Management and Emergency Response (HAMMER) Federal Training Center.
Central Plateau Cleanup, which succeeds Jacobs subsidiary CH2M, will handled decommissioning and demolition of facilities, along with preventing contamination from reaching the Columbia River.
