The Energy Department confirmed Monday it has formally extended Savannah River Remediation’s (SRR) contract to manage liquid waste operations at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina through Sept. 30, 2020.
The agreement was signed March 29. The extension is valued at roughly $750 million, SRR lead partner AECOM said in a Tuesday news release.
Savannah River Remediation began work on its initial eight-year contract in July 2009. The vendor has received a series of incremental extensions since the original $4 billion contract ended in June 2017. The most recent extension expired on Sunday.
The other members of the SRR team are Bechtel, Jacobs subsidiary CH2M, and BWX Technologies.
In late February, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management called off plans to reissue an award for a new 10-year contract potentially worth $6 billion for SRS liquid waste management – a blow to a trio of vendor teams pursuing the business since the draft solicitation was issued in March 2016. The agency cited changes in its own procurement strategy and the situation at Savannah River as its rationale for canceling the long-term award.
The DOE nuclear cleanup office has shifted toward an “end state” approach in contracting, which focuses more on payment of higher fees for earlier completion of work that hastens completions of remediation. The Energy Department said it wants the L-Basin and H-Canyon facilities at Savannah River to be part of the follow-on award at Savannah River. The facilities represent the only new source of liquid waste being added to the 35 million gallons at the site’s tank farms.
During the extension, SRR will continue to operate the Defense Waste Processing Facility and the Saltstone Processing Facility, continue the Tank Closure Cesium Removal demonstration, and proceed with double-stacking canisters at Glass Waste Storage Building 1, the Energy Department said in a Tuesday news release.
This extension maintains continuity while DOE continues resumes procurement toward award of a new liquid waste contract, the agency said. The most agency’s procurement schedule published in March does not list a timeline for SRS liquid waste.
“We are committed to safely managing the radioactive waste system at the site while reducing the state of South Carolina’s critical environmental risk,” John Vollmer, AECOM’s president of Management Services, said in the company release.
In October 2017, the department awarded a new $4.7 billion contract for the waste work to Savannah River EcoManagement, led by BWXT and featuring Bechtel and Honeywell. The BWXT team proposed the low bid, followed by a $5.5 billion proposal from Fluor-Westinghouse and an offer of just under $6 billion from an AECOM-CH2M team.
The victory, however, didn’t last long for EcoManagement. In February 2018, the Government Accountability Office upheld a bid protest brought by the AECOM-CH2M partnership because DOE failed to properly vet the technical approach for waste processing proposed by the winning team. A couple of months afterward, the agency requested last and best offers from all three bidders.
A source speculated this week that DOE would also extend the contract for the SRS management contractor, Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, through September 2020. That would put it on the same cycle as the liquid waste procurement. The SRNS team is currently working under a contract extension through July of this year. Work began on the original 10-year, $11 billion contract in August 2008. Newport News Nuclear and Honeywell are the other members of SRNS.
Last October, the Energy Department tabled action on the draft RFP for the Savannah River Site management and operations contract pending a decision on the joint National Nuclear Security Administration/Office of Environmental Management study on the future of NNSA activities at SRS. The study, which could determine which DOE branch acts as landlord for SRS, should be finished in the first half of this year. Environmental Management now holds the landlord role.
