The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management expects to award a trio of big contracts, two of them re-awards following protests by losing bidders, by the end of the year.
The department hopes this month to reissue both the liquid waste management contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and a consolidated technical support award for the Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, said Tamara Miles, federal procurement director for DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center.
The office also expects within 60 to 90 days to issue a contract for construction of the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, Miles said Wednesday during a panel discussion at an Energy, Technology, and Environmental Business Association (ETEBA) conference in Knoxville, Tenn.
Savannah River EcoManagement, a venture led by BWX Technologies, won a 10-year, $4.7 billion liquid waste contract last October. In February, however, the Government Accountability Office upheld a bid protest brought by a team of AECOM and CH2M. The GAO determined the Energy Department failed to properly establish the viability of the winning bidder’s technical approach for processing the facility’s radioactive waste and converting it into more stable forms. The Energy Department had the original three bidding teams – including a Fluor-Westinghouse venture – submit refreshed proposals last spring.
One industry source said this week he expects a contract award could come any time now, adding that DOE apparently contacted bidders recently on some additional details.
In July, DOE awarded a contract worth up to $137 million over five years to a subsidiary of Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based Professional Project Services (Pro2Serve) for technical support services for environmental remediation of former gaseous diffusion plants at the Paducah Site in Kentucky and Portsmouth Site in Ohio, along with the DOE office that oversees the work. But the following month the agency said it would revisit the procurement following a protest by a rival bidder, Strategic Management Solutions.
The Energy Department issued its request for proposals for the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility contract in March. The plant would treat mercury-contaminated water that flows from the Y-12 National Security Complex storm sewer to East Fork Poplar Creek. The $100 million facility would also treat further mercury contamination as more old buildings are torn down at Oak Ridge.
The schedules noted by Miles are in keeping with a just-updated DOE schedule for anticipated contract awards.
EM Issues Updated RFP Schedule
The three solicitations are among many in an updated procurement timetable published Oct. 1 by DOE’s nuclear cleanup office.
Norbert Doyle, deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and project management, and Anne Marie Bird, small business manager for EM’s Cincinnati-based business center, provided a briefing on procurement opportunities at the conclusion of the ETEBA conference.
The latest timeline document suggests the RFP for the potential $15 billion management and operations contract for the Savannah River Site should be issued by the end of 2018, with a contract award anticipated by September 2019. The draft RFP was issued in August. Incumbent Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) recently received a one-year extension, to July 31 of next year, to its $9.5 billion, decade-long contract.
The SRS Paramilitary Security contract, worth up to $1 billion over 10 years, could be issued this month, according to the document. The final RFP could land in January 2019, with contract award envisioned in January 2020. The agreement would include protecting assets overseen by the Environmental Management office and DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at Savannah River. Centerra-SRS holds the current 10-year, $1 billion paramilitary contract, which expires on Oct. 7, 2019.
A draft RFP for Oak Ridge Reservation cleanup, potentially worth $6 billion over 10 years, could be issued by the end of this month, with the final RFP arriving in January 2019 and the contract award coming by April 2020. It is a successor agreement of sorts to the $2.7 billion URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) contract, set to expire in July 2020, for remediation of the East Tennessee Technology Park.
