The Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SNRS) will continue managing the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina for up to three more years, the agency announced Thursday.
The contract extension includes a 14-month base worth $1.5 billion, plus a pair of one-year options, the value of which DOE did not disclose.
That keeps SRNS on the job at least from Aug. 1 through Sept. 30, 2020, and possibly through Sept. 2022. The extension is the second for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, which took over management of the site in 2008. The first extension — awarded in 2018 after it became clear DOE was still deciding on the structure of a long term follow-on contract — is worth $1 billion through July 31.
“This extension enables SRS to maintain M&O [management and operation] services while DOE develops an acquisition strategy and subsequent contract competition for those services,” DOE’s Savannah River Operations Office said in a press release announcing the deal.
There is no timeline for new contract solicitations, an agency spokesperson said.
The 10-year pact SRNS signed with DOE in 2008 was worth $9.5 billion. The deal, separate from the Savannah River liquid-waste cleanup contract, covers site management, operation of the Savannah River National Laboratory, and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) work including the crucial tritium-harvesting mission.
Tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope, boosts the explosive power of nuclear weapons. At Savannah River Site, personnel fill new tritium reservoirs with gas extracted from DOE-produced rods irradiated during commercial operation of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 reactor.
Also under SRNS’ purview is processing and storage of special nuclear materials, such as highly enriched uranium.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is a partnership of Fluor, Honeywell, and Stoller Newport News Nuclear. The company manages some 5,300 employees at the 310-square-mile site near Aiken, S.C.
Savannah River, a former plutonium extraction facility, is today mostly a liquid-waste cleanup site. However, the NNSA is preparing for two long-term plutonium missions: one to produce fissile weapon cores called pits in a factory to be built on the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, another to dispose of surplus weapon-usable plutonium as part of an arms-control pact with Russia.
Both of those missions would go on for decades, with pit production stretching out beyond the notional end of Savannah River’s liquid-waste mission. In the latest Savannah River liquid waste system plan, contractor Savannah River Remediation estimated that mission would wrap up around 2040.
