Starting Oct. 5, a new Amentum-led team will begin a 60-day transition to take over as prime contractor for the mostly solid-waste cleanup of the Hanford Site’s central plateau, the Department of Energy said Tuesday.
Central Plateau Cleanup Co., comprising Amentum, Fluor, and Atkins, won the potentially 10-year, $10 billion contract in December. A competing bidder, the Bechtel-led Project W Restoration, quickly filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), but that was dismissed in late April.
Typically, the 60-day transition would have started a couple of weeks after GAO dismissed the protest. But with Hanford, like other DOE nuclear cleanup sites, having temporarily reduced on-site staffing and implemented practices such as physical distancing and mask-wearing to slow the spread of COVID-19, the agency needed more time.
Hanford Mission Integration Solutions, a Leidos-led joint venture that won its contract to provide site-support services in December and also prevailed in a bid protest, started its transition Aug. 17. The new support services contractor, in charge of everything from security, to road maintenance, to recordkeeping and information technology, costs of Leidos, Parsons, and Centerra.
The current services contractor is Mission Support Alliance, a team of Leidos and Centerra, or two-thirds of the new venture’s partners.
Central Plateau Cleanup is taking over from Jacobs subsidiary CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., which has been on the job since October 2008 under a $6.4 billion contract.
Jacobs Senior Vice President and General Manager Karen Wiemelt said Wednesday that her organization is doing its best to share information and make the transition as smooth as possible during this pandemic time.
“We have had the luxury of a little bit of extra time to get ready,” Wiemelt said during the National Cleanup Workshop sponsored by the Energy Communities Alliance in cooperation with the Energy Facilities Contracting Group and the Department of Energy.
Contract transitions are generally “people-intense” and often feature an all-hands meeting where members of existing workforce meet their new bosses, Mark Whitney, executive vice president and general Manager of Amentum’ s Nuclear and Environment business and former No. 2 at DOE’s Environmental Management Office, said at the same conference.
With the COVID-19 restrictions, more such meetings are happening virtually, although other transition chores, like doing a walk-through of various parts of the property, are still done in-person, he said.
By Oct. 8, Central Plateau Cleanup will launch a company website that includes a list of key personnel, organizational structure and other key information, according to DOE’s press release.
The new contractor will demolish old buildings, manage waste removal, comply with federal environmental laws and ensure radioactive contamination does not reach the Columbia River.
“Our goal is to be the safest, best-performing, most-respected cleanup contractor in the Department of Energy complex,” said Central Plateau Cleanup Co. President and Project Manager Scott Sax in the release.
“This leadership team and the site’s talented workforce have what it takes to support DOE and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new end state contract approach,” said Fluor Government Group President Tom D’Agostino in a Thursday press release.
