A joint venture led by BWX Technologies, Savannah River Mission Completion, has taken over liquid waste operations now at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC), which began its transition at the end of November, was to officially assume control of the waste management operations from Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation on Sunday, according to a Feb. 23 employee bulletin from SRMC President and Program Manager David Olson.
“We developed a COVID-19 plan that is much different from past plans,” Olson said. While the new team will still follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the site’s Infections Disease Response Team, vaccination “is not a condition of employment.”
New DOE contractor teams typically rehire the incumbent’s workforce. While SRR and other Office of Environmental Management providers have said the vast majority of their employees are inoculated against COVID-19, the site has to contend with a December decision by a U.S. District Court judge in Georgia to block the federal government’s vaccine requirement for contractors.
The government is trying to get an appeals court to reverse that decision and the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit was set to hear oral arguments about that in April.
“Teleworking, which primarily started to support COVID protocols, will continue at this time,” Olson said. “We’ll review our policy, look at the value of teleworking to the company.” The new liquid waste boss said the contractor will set up an “offsite collaboration area that will be a good hybrid option.”
The new team won a potential 10-year, $21-billion contract from DOE in October over three other bidders. Along with BWXT, other partners are Fluor and Amentum, while the teaming subcontractors are WesWorks and DBD.
BWXT is also a member of the Amentum-led incumbent Savannah River Remediation. The other members of the incumbent are Bechtel and Jacobs. The departing team has been at Savannah River since July 2009 under a contract valued at $7.5 billion after several extensions.
Cleanup work under the new contract includes liquid waste stabilization and disposal, operation of the tank farms as well as the Defense Waste Processing Facility that turns high-level radioactive waste into glass. In a few weeks, the new contractor is scheduled to take over the Salt Waste Processing Facility from Parsons, which built the plant.
