Twenty firms attended the Feb. 11 industry day for a potential five-year contract to provide support services at the Department of Energy’s Paducah Site in Kentucky.
In addition to incumbent Swift & Staley, participants included Spectra Tech, Atkins Nuclear, GEM Technologies, Navarr0 Research and Engineering, ARS Aleut Remediation, Banda Group International, Boston Government Services, and Los Alamos Technical Associates.
Swift & Staley’s five-year, $185 million contract is set to expire in September. It covers operations including safeguards and security, property management, snow removal, records management, and preparation of briefings and public documents. The Paducah-based firm has not responded to requests for comment on the new procurement, although it did send three representatives to the industry day, according to the attendee list.
The Energy Department issued a request for proposals earlier this month for a new small business set-aside. The exact value of the contract was not mentioned in the Feb. 3 DOE press release, but slides presented at the industry day suggest it could be a maximum of $50 million per year.
Key personnel for the proposal will be at minimum the project manager and the security manager, according to the DOE documents.
Bids are due by March 19. Before that, the DOE requests that interested vendors should file an intention to bid notice by Feb. 28 at [email protected].
The vendor would support both the 10-year, $1.48 billion deactivation and remediation contract at Paducah, held since June 2017 by Jacobs-led Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership, along with the five-year, $319-million depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) deal held by Atkins-led Mid America Conversion Services since February 2017.
The contract will include a 60‐day transition period, followed by a 34‐month base period and one two‐year option periods.
The Paducah Site is spread across 3,500 acres located more than three miles from the Ohio River. About 750 acres are within the security fence. In 1950 the Western Kentucky site was the second of three locations picked by the U.S. government to do uranium enrichment for nuclear weapons.
Thanks to the Energy Policy Act, a private company USEC (now Centrus Energy) took over uranium enrichment, largely for the nuclear power industry, in 1992. Enrichment ended and cleanup accelerated in 2013.
Due to off‐site contamination, the Paducah was listed on the National Priorities List in 1994.
