The new technical support services contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office (PPPO) has received its formal notice to proceed with the transition from its predecessors.
The formal notice to proceed was issued to Pro2Serve subsidiary Enterprise Technical Assistance Services (E-TAS) on Jan. 6, a DOE spokesperson said in a Jan. 10 email. The notice comes weeks after the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) rejected a rival’s protest of the $137 million award.
Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based E-TAS will perform technical and administration support for nuclear cleanup and depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion operations at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and Paducah Site in Kentucky, along with PPPO headquarters in Lexington, Ky. The work includes technical engineering tasks, infrastructure support, information technology, and oversight of safeguards and security.
The PPPO technical support services were spread across three contracts held by Pro2Serve, Oak Ridge-based RSI EnTech, and Albuquerque, N.M.-based Strategic Management Solutions Inc. (SMSI). The latter firm brought the unsuccessful bid challenge before the GAO.
The congressional auditor said contract proposals filed by Enterprise Technical Assistance Services and Strategic Management Solutions were equally good, and the E-TAS proposal was $6 million cheaper. The GAO also dismissed the SMSI assertion that E-TAS has a conflict of interest because parent Pro2Serve has a subcontract the Fluor-BWX Technologies joint venture that manages decommissioning and demolition at Portsmouth.
The E-TAS small business contract includes a three-year base period and an optional two-year extension. The firm is expected to take over PPPO technical support at the end of March.
Professional Project Services, or Pro2Serve, is an employee-owned engineering and information solutions company. Last month, the company received a three-year, $2.3 million DOE contract to provide technical services to support Centrus Energy’s construction of a 16-machine uranium enrichment cascade at the Portsmouth Site. The project is part of the agency’s research into high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel.
