Dan Leone
WC Monitor
1/22/2016
Savannah River Nuclear River Solutions (SRNS) in fiscal 2015 earned a $37.8 million fee on its Savannah River Site management and operations contract with the Energy Department, or 82 percent of what it could have earned, DOE announced late Tuesday.
The company — an industry team comprised of Fluor, Honeywell International, and Huntington Ingalls Industries subsidiary Newport News Nuclear — is DOE’s prime contractor on both cleanup and refining at the Savannah River Site under a management and operations contract awarded in 2008. Including options, the deal is potentially worth nearly $460 million through July 31, 2018.
The company’s total award fee is split between DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), which oversees cleanup of legacy weapons programs at Savannah River, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semiautonomous DOE branch that oversees nuclear arsenal and defense work at sites around the nation.
SRNS raked in about $27.2 million from EM, 88 percent of its potential fee. From the National Nuclear Security Administration, the company got some $13.7 million, or 74 percent of the available fee from the agency for fiscal 2015.
SRNS received an overall rating of “very good,” indicating the company “exceeded many of the significant award fee criteria and met performance requirements of the contract,” DOE wrote in its award notice.
DOE lauded the company for starting the so-called Head End process at H-Canyon ahead of schedule. April 2015 was the first time in “several years” the Head End process — a cleanup method for liquid waste — was used at the site, SNRS said in a statement marking the milestone last spring.
However, SRNS lost out on some fees for a Sept. 3 mishap in which workers on the site’s HB Line placed 400 grams of plutonium in a container not marked for transport. The gaffe, traced to a procedural violation that posed no risk of nuclear criticality, forced SNRS to shut down all of its nonessential nuclear and non-nuclear operations at the site for about a month.
Meanwhile, Savannah River Remediation, the DOE site contractor focused on liquid waste disposal at Savannah River, got a roughly $29 million fee for fiscal 2015, better than 95 percent of the total fee available.
Among other things, the contractor drew praise for closing Tank 12, a Cold War-era underground waste storage tank, ahead of schedule in 2015. In September, a month ahead of its deadline, Savannah River Remediation removed highly radioactive waste from the tank and filled the reservoir with grout. The tank is the first of 29 to be closed at the SRS H Tank Farm.
DOE also dinged Savannah River Remediation because “an increase in radiological contaminations were noted in several areas,” according to the latest award fee determination scorecard. The agency did not say where it noticed this increased contamination.
Likewise, DOE docked dollars because its contractor’s emergency preparedness plans and staff levels were not up to snuff. In late December, Savannah River Remediation increased from 3.5 full-time emergency preparedness employees to 10, and started work on preparing new emergency drills desired by DOE. The agency noted the contractor’s progress in the latest scorecard, saying the actions “suggest an improvement.”
Awarded in 2008, Savannah River Remediation’s liquid-waste cleanup contract is worth roughly $4 billion through June 2017. DOE picked up a two-year, $800 million option on the deal back in April.
Savannah River Remediation is an industry partnership led by AECOM and including Bechtel National, CH2M, and Babcock and Wilcox.
