A team comprised of Stoller Newport News Nuclear and BWX Technologies has been awarded a $1.39 billion contract for legacy cleanup operations at the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
This will be Stoller’s first major operational contract at the nuclear weapons lab, where BWXT is an old hand as a partner in current environmental remediation and management contractor Los Alamos National Security.
“We are pleased that the Department of Energy has entrusted us with this important mission,” Stoller Newport News Nuclear (SN3) President Nick Lombardo said in a press release. “SN3 has served the department in New Mexico for decades, and we look forward to expanding that service in northern New Mexico.”
“Our nuclear environmental management credentials are particularly well suited to the complex, multi-year projects we will undertake at Los Alamos with our partner SN3 on behalf of our EM clients,” BWXT President and CEO Rex Geveden added in prepared comments Thursday.
The existing cleanup contract expires on March 31. In addition to a 90-day transition period, the new contract includes a base period of five years with two optional periods of three years and two years, DOE said in a Wednesday news release. The department said the contract includes a cost-plus-fee mechanism with a cost-reimbursement clause for the transition period. There is also an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity line item.
The contract calls for protecting the regional aquifer and remediation of contaminated legacy waste sites in and around LANL, as well as decontamination, decommissioning, and demolition of various structures. The Stoller-led contractor, formally named Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos LLC (N3B), must also prepare and characterize transuranic and mixed-low-level radioactive waste that will eventually be shipped off-site.
It was not immediately known how many other teams submitted bids or exactly who they were. There was also no word by press time if a DOE debrief had been scheduled yet for winning team or other bidders.
One industry source said he was somewhat surprised by the award because he’d heard a CH2M-Fluor team was considered a leading candidate.
A second industry source thought it was interesting that Stoller, a subsidiary of Navy shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls, is the lead partner on the contract. Los Alamos National Security – which consists of Bechtel National, BWXT, AECOM, and the University of California – is seemingly being eased out the door after a 2014 radiation release at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., was traced to a waste container from the lab. Perhaps Stoller is the lead on the new contract in part to reduce any stigma attached with having a LANS member out front, the source speculated.
When contacted, two members of the LANS team, Bechtel and AECOM, said they did not pursue the cleanup contract.
Los Alamos National Security’s bridge cleanup contract was originally set to expire on Sept. 30, but the company was granted a six-month, $65 million extension to finish up treatment of nitrate salt drums. After missing earlier deadlines, LANS said in November it had finished treating 60 potentially combustible containers of radioactive waste.
The drums contained a radioactive mix of nitrate salts and organic kitty litter similar to the combination that in February 2014 blew open a container at WIPP, shutting down the transuranic waste disposal facility for about three years.
The six-month contract extension for LANS covered both those 60 potentially explosive drums and 29 separate drums of unremediated nitrate salts. LANS has said it will also be finished with the second group of drums before the end of March.
Watchdog Group Fears ‘Cleanup On the Cheap’
Nuclear Watch New Mexico Executive Director Jay Coghlan said in a press release the new deal does not provide enough funds for the legacy waste. The contract works out to $139 million annually. “This dooms the Lab to cleanup on the cheap,” Coghlan said.
The 10-year contract had been expected to be in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion per year, or roughly $150 million annually.
NukeWatch Operations and Research Director Scott Kovac said by email the group does look forward to meeting the new contractor team. “But the new 2016 Consent Order set the requirements for the amount of cleanup funding too low before any [Environmental Management] contractor was considered.”
Federal and New Mexico officials have scheduled a public meeting on Jan. 16 to discuss planning issues connected with a 2016 update to the 2005 consent order on legacy cleanup at Los Alamos.
The New Mexico Environment Department will host the meeting, and DOE’s Environmental Management (EM) Los Alamos Field Office will report on cleanup progress at the lab during fiscal 2017 and the goals for fiscal 2018, which began on Oct. 1.
The updated consent order (CO) between DOE and New Mexico governs the cleanup through a “campaign‐based approach,” the state agency said in a Monday news release.
The 2016 version puts less emphasis on hard deadlines and instead focuses on 17 campaigns of related cleanup work. The agreement mandates an annual planning review for considering updates to the plan.
The meeting is scheduled for 5 p.m. local time at the Los Alamos County Council Chambers, 1000 Central Ave. in Los Alamos. For more information about the event, contact Neelam Dhawan at [email protected].
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