With the Energy Department temporarily doing only minimal physical work at the Hanford Site in Washington state due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is apt to further delay award of a potential 10-year, $15 billion contract for tank waste management at the facility, a source said Wednesday.
Many in industry expected the contract for managing and ultimately closing underground liquid waste tanks would come in the opening weeks of 2020, after DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in December awarded two multibillion-dollar contracts at the former plutonium production complex.
But January brought bid protests against the 10-year, $4-billion site services contract award to a Leidos-led venture, as well as the Hanford Central Plateau cleanup business worth up to $10 billion over a decade for a joint venture headed by Amentum.
Those developments likely pushed back the Energy Department’s schedule for awarding the tank contract, Jacobs Chairman and CEO Steven Demetriou predicted during an earnings call in February. Bid protests tend to make the federal agency more deliberate in issuing subsequent procurement awards, he and other industry officials say. Jacobs is seeking the tank-waste business.
There is probably no more than 20% of the 11,000-member workforce currently on-site at Hanford due to work reductions triggered in reaction to the pandemic.
On Wednesday, an executive with a separate DOE contractor, which is also pursuing the tank management contract, said the minimal staffing levels at DOE will likely further delay the award. “How do you transition to a new contract” when it is virtually impossible for a new vendor to conduct training and large meetings, the industry source said.
It is far from clear how a new management team can even travel to the site to set up operations, given the current Energy Department and other government restrictions on in-person meetings and any nonessential business travel, a source with a third DOE contractor said.
Indeed, the Energy Department itself indicated March 14 that many procurements could be slowed by restrictions accompanying the pandemic.
Washington River Protection Solutions, a venture comprised of Amentum and Atkins, currently holds the contract for management of 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste at Hanford. The contract, valued at $7.8 billion, started in October 2008 and is slated to expire in September.
