URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) scooped up nearly all of its available award fee for cleanup operations at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee in the six months ended Sept. 30, according to the contractor’s latest award-fee scorecard.
During the period just scored, UCOR earned some $3.4 million in fees, good for about 94 percent of the total $3.6 million available in the final half of fiscal 2016.
The fee includes over $1.4 million for good project management and nearly $2 million for meeting cost and schedule benchmarks: respectively, 89 percent and 99 percent of the total available for the two main categories DOE assesses for each award-fee period.
Notably during the period just scored, UCOR completed the roughly $300 million demolition of the K-27 building at Oak Ridge. Elimination of the fifth and final gaseous diffusion plant at what is now the East Tennessee Technology Park marked the first time in the nearly 30-year history of the Environmental Management program that DOE has dismantled an entire uranium enrichment complex. UCOR started demolishing the 383,000-square-foot building in February after two years of pre-demo cleanup.
“UCOR completed the K-27 Building demolition, debris and compressor removal, and offsite shipments of converters ahead of schedule and actual costs were less than planned costs,” DOE fee determination official John A. Mullis II said in the scorecard memo to UCOR President and Project Manager Ken Rueter.
In the latest scorecard, DOE lauded UCOR for its progress and said the company “is performing well against the cost and schedule plan” under the ETTP cleanup contract. Likewise, UCOR’s projected timeline and cost for remaining work under the contract is “realistic and reasonable,” according to Mullis.
Within the project management category, UCOR left a little money on the table in the worker safety, health, and quality management subcategory. The company netted 80 percent of the $648,732 available incentive, for a total of $518,986 and a rating of “very good.” DOE did not specifically address UCOR’s shortcomings in this subcategory but did note there was “room for improvement” in several contract areas, including “the implementation of the hierarchy of controls and Industrial Hygiene Work Permit process for the repackaging of a deteriorated alumina oxide drum” located in a shipping container at the site’s Molten Salt Reactor experiment.
The company earned “excellent” ratings in the two other subcategories of project management: project management and business systems and environmental management. In the first subcategory, UCOR earned 95 percent of the available $567,640 for a total fee of $539,258. In the second, it took home 94 percent of the available $405,458 for a payout of $381,130.
For the project management category as a whole, UCOR was rated “very good.”
In the cost and schedule category, UCOR earned $1.96 million of the possible $1.98 million and a rating of “high-confidence.”
The scorecard lists a number of accomplishments by UCOR over the six months, including:
• Beginning operations to deal with “failing infrastructure” at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s liquid waste treatment and processing system, with the aim of extending the system’s service life.
• Going over 7.5 million hours without a lost time injury, and carrying out 11,349 waste shipments to on-site landfills for fiscal 2016 without any transportation accidents or incidents.
• Ongoing “outstanding support” for reindustrialization and historic preservation at the East Tennessee Technology Park.
The DOE six-month performance ratings for UCOR are the same as those the department issued in its previous scorecard, covering Oct. 1, 2015, to March 31, 2016. In that period, the company earned $3.58 million of the total available award fee of $3.83 million.
UCOR had not commented on the latest award-fee scorecard as of Weapons Complex Monitor deadline Friday.
