The Department of Energy has extended through January existing contracts for environmental cleanup and depleted uranium work at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
The contracts for both Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, which handles decontamination and decommissioning, and Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services, which does the depleted uranium work, will now run through Jan. 31, a DOE spokesperson said in an email reply to an Exchange Monitor inquiry Wednesday.
Without extensions, both contracts would have lapsed this past weekend (Sept. 30).
Prior to the latest extensions, the Fluor-BWXT contract, in place since August 2010, was valued at $5 billion. Its four-month extension is worth about $163 million, according to DOE. The Mid-America contract, which began in November 2016 was valued at $789 million and its extension is worth $38 million.
Meanwhile, during a conference in Knoxville, Tenn., the manager of the Portsmouth Paducah Project Office, Joel Bradburne, declined to divulge any clues on when the agency might be awarding the Portsmouth Paducah Operations and Site Management contract.
“We’re closer than we have ever been,” Bradburne said in response to a question submitted by the audience at the Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association conference. The field office manager left it at that.
The solicitation for the Operations and Site Management contract, which will combine the depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion now done by Mid-America with operations from other contracts, was issued in May 2022. The 10-year contract could be worth around $2.9 billion, with options, DOE has said.
Sources have previously said there could be at least four teams vying for the new DUF6 deal. One is an Atkins-Westinghouse team, which amounts to two-thirds of the incumbent Mid-America, minus Fluor. Others in the mix are said to include a Bechtel-Amentum partnership, a Huntington Ingalls-Jacobs team and a BWXT-Honeywell team.
Though Fluor-BWXT is staying on the job as the Portsmouth decontamination and decommissioning prime for a little while longer, DOE has already locked up its next contractor for that work.
In July, the agency awarded the $5.87-billion Decontamination and Decommissioning Contract to Southern Ohio Cleanup Co., which is made up of Amentum, Fluor and Cavendish Nuclear. DOE has held off on proceeding with transition to the new Portsmouth environmental team in anticipation of moving it and the new Portsmouth/Paducah contract on the same timeline.
