A small business solicitation for nuclear cleanup, expected out within the next month, could be the only new one to hit the street by August, the Department of Energy Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center said this week.
The DOE previously said the request for proposals (RFP) Small Business Nationwide Deactivation, Decommissioning and Removal contract could be out by early April. In a procurement notice Wednesday, the agency said it might be the only new final RFP to come out by the end of August. The solicitation is a small business set-aside for remediation and removal at federal properties nationwide.
At an industry conference in Phoenix in early March, DOE procurement officials said a contractor for cleanup of the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the integrated tank management contract for the Hanford Site in Washington state are undergoing evaluation prior to award.
The former top boss from the Department of Energy’s former prime contractor at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is now a project manager with the Amentum-led environmental remediation contractor at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, according to a spokesperson at the site..
Sean Dunagan was president and project manager of Amentum-led Nuclear Waste Partnership for about four years, until this February when the DOE contractor for the underground waste repository near Carlsbad, N.M., was replaced by a Bechtel affiliate.
Dunagan is now a senior project manager with Amentum-led United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR), A UCOR spokesperson said Monday that Dunagan would be working with “critical projects” at Oak Ridge, such as the Environmental Management Disposal Facility landfill and the Outfall-200 Mercury Treatment plant. The landfill has received its major federal and state approvals and the mercury treatment plant is already under construction.
Employees of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory who sued over the lab contractor’s COVID-19 vaccination policy have “narrowed the issues” to be addressed in ongoing settlement talks, according to a recent court filing.
Attorneys for the management contractor UT-Battelle, composed of the University of Tennessee and Battelle, and the half-dozen employees who sued, should report back to the U.S. District Court Judge Charles Atchley, Jr. in Knoxville by April 7, according to a March 7 court order.
“The parties believe the process has been productive and that they are making progress,” with the assistance of mediator Chad Hatmaker, the judge wrote in the order, which was filed after a March 3 status report from the parties.
Eight new members formally joined the Department of Energy’s citizen advisory board for the Office of Environmental Management at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, the online Oak Ridge Today reported recently.
The citizen board is set up to provide advice and recommendations to Environmental Management’s office at Oak Ridge. A link to the panel’s annual report for 2022 can be found here.
Viewers of the Oscars television broadcast on Sunday, March 12, might have seen a commercial touting “Oppenheimer” a biographical film about Robert Oppenheimer, who ran what became the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, later National Laboratory, during the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer is sometimes called by historians the father of the father of the atomic bomb.
The film is directed by Christopher Nolan, director of “Interstellar,” “Dunkirk,” and a trilogy of Batman movies, and is based upon the Oppenheimer biography, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
