PHOENIX – The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is no longer producing a public roundup of solicitation timelines for cleanup jobs within the nuclear weapons complex, a procurement official said here Tuesday.
“We no longer have a procurement schedule on the website,” Norbert Doyle, EM deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and program management, said during a panel discussion at the annual Waste Management Symposia.
“We had a hard time keeping that up to date,” he added. The last schedule update was posted in May 2019.
In addition to listing when major requests for proposals would be issued, the procurement schedule identified three-month windows for contract awards. The published timelines often missed the mark. For example, the last version said the multibillion-dollar tank management contract for the Hanford Site in Washington state would be out by August 2019, but it hasn’t been issued yet.
But Doyle said DOE procurement officials will share as much information as possible on RFP and award schedules in public sessions such as the one in Phoenix.
For example, Doyle said the next tank management contract at the Hanford Site in Washington state is in final stages of review and should be out “soon.” He declined to be specific on how “soon” this might be.
In addition, Doyle said a draft RFP could be issued for operation of the Savannah River National Laboratory, within a few weeks. The Energy Department is looking to carve that off from the management contract for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which is held by Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
“We believe it will help the lab grow,” Doyle said.
Within a few months, DOE could also announce a solicitation for a landlord services contract for the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, similar to the site services RFP recently issued for the Paducah Site in Kentucky. Swift & Staley is the site services incumbent at the Kentucky site, with a five-year, $192 million contract that runs through September. The landlord services contract includes a wide gamut of work ranging from road upkeep and snow removal to electronic records management.
Speaking of Portsmouth, DOE announced recently it plans to extend Fluor-BWXT’s decommissioning contract by two years. The vendor already has a 10-year, $3.9 billion contract that runs through March 2021. Basically, the agency does not think this would be a good time to switch contractors at the former gaseous diffusion plant site in Ohio. Fluor-BWXT expects to start tearing down the X-326 Process Building starting this fall. Likewise, the contractor will start operation this year of a new On-Site Waste Disposal Facility for debris from demolition.
Likewise, DOE decided this is not an opportune time to switch remediation contractors at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee. There incumbent URS/CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) could be kept on through July 2022. The Amentum-led incumbent has a $3.2 billion decontamination and decommissioning contract that started in August 2011 and barring extension would end this July. The vendor UCOR is finishing demolition of buildings at the East Tennessee Technology Center, a former uranium enrichment complex at Oak Ridge. Once that is done remediation will focus on the Y-12 National Security Site and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The agency is also pleased to see plenty of interest expressed in the potential 15-year, $6.4 billion Idaho National Laboratory cleanup contract. The Energy Department would combine the current Fluor Idaho remediation contract for five years and nearly $2 billion with Spectra Tech’s five-year, $45 million contract for management of spent nuclear fuel at INL and Fort Vrain, Colo. The latter contract is expected to run through March 2021.
