The Energy Department confirmed Monday it has formally extended Savannah River Remediation’s contract to manage liquid waste operations at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina through Sept. 30, 2020.
The agreement was signed Friday. The extension is valued at roughly $750 million, AECOM said in a Tuesday news release.
AECOM-led 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.
Among other things, the work covers operation of existing facilities for storage, treatment, stabilization, and disposal of liquid radioactive tank 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.
