Representatives of seven companies attended a mandatory preproposal briefing for a contract to build custom road equipment needed to transport tritium to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., from a commercial nuclear power plant in Tennessee, according to a document the Department of Energy published online Tuesday.
The companies that attended the August meeting, and the number of representatives they sent, were:
- Holtec Government Services, Camden, N.J., two representatives.
- Leidos, Reston, Va., one representative.
- NAC International, a U.S. subsidiary of Japan’s Hitachi, Norcross, Ga., three representatives.
- Orano Federal Services, the former AREVA Federal Services, Aiken, S.C., six representatives.
- Robatel Technologies, Roanoke, Va., one representative.
- Vigor Works, Clackamas, Ore., two representatives.
- Westinghouse Electric Co., Monroeville, Pa., two representatives.
Through spokespersons, Holtec, Orano and Westinghouse declined to comment about whether they had bid. The other companies did not reply to requests for comment this week.
Battelle, which manages DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., is soliciting bids on a firm-fixed-price contract to build a custom container and road trailer to haul irradiated tritium-producing burnable absorber rods to Savannah River from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 nuclear reactor in Rhea County, Tenn.
Bids are due Nov. 9. The road equipment must be ready by May 2023, according to Battelle’s solicitation.
Tritium-producing burnable absorber rods generate tritium when irradiated in a nuclear reactor. Watts Bar Unit 1 is the only reactor currently approved for this use, though Unit 2 could be approved for the job by late 2020.
The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration harvests fresh tritium from the rods at Savannah River to refill tritium reservoirs of existing nuclear weapons at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Tritium decays at a rate of about 5.5 percent annually, meaning weapons must be refilled with the radioactive hydrogen isotope periodically.
