With fewer than six months left on the incumbent’s contract, the Department of Energy still has not started competition for the next Savannah River Site management and operations deal — the pact that includes running the National Nuclear Security Administration’s tritium program.
The NNSA extracts tritium gas, which boosts the yield of nuclear weapons, at the Savannah River Site (SRS). That work, along with other projects, was expected to cost the agency about $300 million at the Aiken, S.C. site in fiscal 2018. An NNSA spokesperson in Washington would not say Thursday what steps, if any, the agency could take to avoid disrupting the tritium mission.
Extending the existing management and operations contract, held by the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, is one obvious step. However, a spokesperson for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) declined to say whether it would consider that course of action. The incumbent’s contract runs out July 31 and is worth about $9.5 billion, with options.
The Environmental Management office is the main Department of Energy presence at Savannah River. The office administers both the site’s management and operations contract, which covers the NNSA work, and a separate SRS liquid-waste cleanup contract worth roughly $4.5 billion.
In October, DOE awarded the latest liquid-waste pact to a Savannah River EcoManagement: a team led by BWXT Technical Services Group and featuring Bechtel National and Honeywell International. The decision immediately drew protests from several companies that, on paper, appear to be at least a partial fit for the next SRS management and operations contract.
The Government Accountability Office has until March to rule on the protests, and the fallout from the decision could affect the competitive landscape for the new SRS management and operations contract. The two losing teams both lodged protests: an AECOM-CH2M partnership and a Fluor-Westinghouse venture.
If the Environmental Management office’s original procurement forecast had held, officials would have had more than a year to get a new management and operations contractor on the job at SRS. The office had planned to release a draft solicitation by June 2017, according to a request for information published in October 2016. However, the draft request for proposals has not yet been issued.
In congressional testimony Tuesday, departing NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz said SRS is “particularly important” to the Department of Energy weapons program.
Another major nonproliferation project at the Savannah River Site, the still-under-construction and now-perennially embattled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, is not part of the SRS management and operations contract or the liquid waste contract. The plant, being built by CB&I AREVA MOX Services, is intended to eliminate 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium, but both the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations have sought to cancel the project.
In the fiscal 2018 budget request released in May, the NNSA forecast it would spend almost $300 million at the Savannah River Site in 2018, up from just under $240 million in fiscal 2017. Directed stockpile work within the Weapons Activities account — the category that includes tritium extraction — would make up most of the increase at the site.
For now, though, the NNSA remains funded at 2017 budget levels under a stopgap budget bill called a continuing resolution. That bill expires on Jan. 19, by which time Congress will have to pass a permanent federal budget, or another temporary spending bill.
