The Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) could be eligible for around $250 million in fees over three years, if the Department of Energy picks up the team’s options to manage the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., according to the text of a contract modification awarded over the summer.
The modification, signed on July 15 and including 14 firm months of work for the incumbent, is the second extension in as many years for SRNS. It arrived as DOE again failed to settle on a strategy for managing both the 310-square-mile site’s Cold War nuclear cleanup mission and its ongoing nuclear weapons work.
Remediation led by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management is slated to finish in the late 2030s, well past the time the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) hopes to be producing at least 50 nuclear-weapon cores annually at a facility to be built on the site’s canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
For the 14-month extension that began Aug. 1 and runs through September 30, 2020, SRNS could take home as much as $87 million in fees. The Energy Department said the total value of the 14-month extension is around $1.5 billion.
For the extension’s first one-year option, which would run Oct. 1, 2020, through Sept. 30, 2021, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions could earn roughly $76.5 million in fees. For the second one-year option, which would cover Oct. 1, 2021, through Sept. 30, 2022, the company could earn about $83 million.
Aside from landlord responsibilities, the contract covers management of the Savannah River National Laboratory, which mainly develops nuclear-cleanup technology, and the NNSA tritium processing at the site’s H-Area. Tritium, the radioactive hydrogen isotope, boosts the explosive power of nuclear weapons.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions has been on the job since 2008, under what was then a 10-year site management contract with the Environmental Management office. That deal was worth around $9.5 billion in 2008. With the two extensions inked since 2018, it will be worth close to $12 billion through September 2020.
In the meantime, Flour plans by next year to sell off its government services business. That would encompass its work for the Energy Department.
