Incumbent North Wind Portage beat out six other small business rivals to win a potentially 10-year, $614-million Moab Remedial Action Contract for cleaning up uranium mill tailings in Utah, the Department of Energy announced Thursday.
Idaho-based North Wind Portage holds the existing $197-environmental remediation contract that started in October 2016 and was scheduled to run through March 31.
The North Wind Portage team has a long history at Moab, having been onsite since 2011, according to a company spokesperson.
“The Moab project has been a cornerstone of North Wind Portage for over 10 years,” said Jeff Scott, president of North Wind Portage in an emailed statement Friday. “I am thrilled that we will be able to continue to partner with DOE to complete the cleanup and closure of this iconic site.”
The new indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract calls for the firm to carry out all cleanup to site closure, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said in a press release. That could take up to 15 years from the time work under the contract begins.
DOE released the final request for proposals (RFP) for the uranium mill tailings project a year ago this month. That followed a draft RFP in October 2020. Under the contract just awarded, DOE can issue the contractor a five-year extension beyond the 10-year ordering period, to stretch the total contract length out to 15 years.
Work revolves around remediation of a 435-acre property near Moab once home to the old Atlas Mineral Corp. uranium ore processing site. The property includes a 130- acres uranium mill tailings pile at the intersection of the Colorado River and the Moab Wash. Tailings are the waste byproducts created by the preliminary refining of uranium ore before the material is shipped off for enrichment.
When Atlas ceased operation under its Nuclear Regulatory Commission license in 1984, there were about 16 million tons or 12 million cubic yards of tailings or “residual radioactive material,” at the site, according to the scope of work for the contract just awarded.
The contractor excavates and removes the tailings from the tailings pile near the Colorado River to a DOE-constructed engineered disposal facility near Crescent Junction, Utah, about 32 miles away. As of this week, more than 12.2 million tons, roughly 76% of the tailings, had been shipped to Cross Junction from Moab, a DOE spokesperson said Friday.
One million tons were shipped during fiscal 2021, the most shipped since 2012, the DOE said in a press release last October.
The contract calls for final remediation of both the Moab tailings sites and the Cross Junction disposal site.
