Savannah River Remediation won 96 percent, or $14.5 million of $15.1 million, of the fee available for its liquid waste management at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina between Oct. 1, 2016, and June 30, 2017, according to a recently disclosed DOE scorecard.
“Overall, SRR’s performance during the evaluation period was excellent,” DOE said. “The contractor has taken positive steps to improve overall conduct of operations, noted as requiring attention in the last award period.”
The scorecard singled out SRR’s handling of an unexpected melter failure that halted waste processing at the Defense Waste Processing Facility. The contractor is preparing to activate a replacement melter. “SRR demonstrated nimbleness in operational and outage planning by accelerating the planned major outage by a number of months,” DOE said.
In addition, the department praised SRR for completing Saltstone Disposal Unit 6, one of several planned 30-million-plus-gallon tanks that will store radioactive salt waste left over from processing some 35 million gallons of Cold War liquid waste stored at the site.
The department noted a higher count of technical safety requirement breaches, including four incidents at the Defense Waste Processing Facility, which as a result was placed into deliberation operations. But the scorecard praised SRR for its response to the issue.
Savannah River Remediation is led by AECOM with partners Bechtel National, CH2M, and BWX Technologies. The SRR team broke up when it came time for procuring a replacement contract.
The Energy Department in October awarded liquid waste work worth up to $4.7 billion over 10 years to Savannah River EcoManagement, a partnership of BWX Technologies, Bechtel National, and Honeywell International. The bid was subsequently protested to the Government Accountability Office by the two losing teams: AECOM and CH2M, which teamed in Savannah River Technology and Remediation; and Fluor Westinghouse Liquid Waste Services.
