In the latest mega-extension for a nuclear-weapons site-management contractor, the National Nuclear Security Administration locked in a Honeywell-led team for five more years at the Nevada National Security Site.
Mission Support and Test Services, which also includes Jacobs Engineering and Huntington Ingalls Industries, will be on site from 2023 through 2028 under five one-year options that the government announced Wednesday it had picked up in one swoop. The five-year base on the contract, awarded in 2017, ran through Dec. 1, 2022.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) did not disclose the value of the options, but the contract on the whole is estimated to cost the government a total of roughly $5 billion, according to Mission Support and Test Services.
It is the second time this year that the NNSA has moved to lock up a major nuclear-weapon site contractor this year. In April, the agency picked up all five years worth of options on a Honeywell subsidiary’s contract to manage the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.
Of the major joint-venture management contractors at the seven major NNSA-owned nuclear-weapon sites, six are locked in at least through the middle of the decade or have options that would allow the agency to make it so.
Only the Honeywell subsidiary managing the Kansas City National Security Campus in Missouri, NNSA’s assembly center for non-nuclear nuclear-weapon parts, has no options beyond 2025 for the agency to exercise in one swoop.
Triad National Security, the three-way nonprofit managing the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has five one-year options on its contract that cover 2024 through 2028. The contract’s five-year base runs through 2023.
The Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., handles tritium processing for NNSA and is supposed to be the site of the agency’s second, and larger, plutonium-pit factory.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management owns Savannah River and administers the management and operations contract there through which NNSA passes money for pits and tritium. In March, citing concerns about NNSA work at the site, DOE extended Savannah River’s Fluor-led management contractor through at least 2026.
