The Savannah River Site Integrated Mission Completion Contract procurement unveiled this week by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will not fund any National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) work.
The draft statement of work released Thursday does not include any NNSA nuclear weapons or nonproliferation work missions, and a spokesperson confirmed the semiautonomous agency is still working out its procurement strategy for future national security work at the Aiken, S.C., campus.
“Acquisition alternatives for future Savannah River-NNSA base mission work are currently being considered and evaluated,” the NNSA spokesperson wrote in a Friday email.
In the meantime, the NNSA will continue to fund nuclear security operations through the Environmental Management-owned management and operations contract with Savannah River Nuclear Solutions: the Fluor-led team with Huntington Ingalls Industries and Honeywell.
However, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions’ contract is set to expire Sept. 30. There is something of a safety net for the NNSA, as the Environmental Management office holds a pair of one-year options that would extend the incumbent through Sept. 30, 2022. The nuclear cleanup office currently contracts for site management and Savannah River National Laboratory management under this contract, and for Cold War liquid-waste cleanup under a separate deal with Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation.
For the 2020s, the office is shifting gears, combining the liquid-waste and site-management contracts while splitting off the Savannah River National Laboratory into a separate contract.
The Environmental Management Office has not said when it might award the new indefinite-quantity/indefinite-delivery, Integrated Mission Completion Contract.
While the award is “not related to NNSA’s base mission,” the NNSA spokesperson stated, the weapons agency could still pass funding through the contract for support functions.
According to the draft statement of work released Thursday, that could include services such as: environmental compliance; maintenance; fire protection; emergency services; and emergency management.
NNSA-specific work at Savannah River includes:
- Converting the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) into the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility — the larger of the agency’s two planned plutonium-pit plants.
- The Surplus Plutonium Disposition project, which will prepare surplus weapon-usable plutonium once intended for conversion into commercial reactor fuel at MFFF for permanent underground disposal at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
- Filling up fresh bottles of tritium, the radioactive hydrogen isotope that increases the yield of nuclear weapons. Those bottles are ultimately installed in warheads and bombs at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. By 2031, the NNSA plans to construct a Tritium Finishing Facility (formerly the Tritium Production Capability) at Savannah River Site to rehome deuterium and tritium processing currently handled at the site’s H Area Old Manufacturing Facility.
