The Amentum-led remediation prime at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee will finish construction of the Mercury Treatment Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex, DOE announced Friday.
Earlier in the week, DOE confirmed to Exchange Monitor the agency will not again extend a contract with a joint venture of APTIM and North Wind Group to finish building the mercury treatment facility.
“UCOR [United Cleanup Oak Ridge] has been involved with this project from the beginning, having provided significant design and engineering support,” said Jay Mullis, Oak Ridge field boss for the DOE Office of Environmental Management, in a Friday press release. “Since UCOR is already tasked with commissioning and operating the facility, tasking them to complete the remaining construction allows for a smooth transition to the next phase of this important project.”
The UCOR team also includes Jacobs, which Amentum reportedly could acquire, and Honeywell.
“APTIM will responsibly support the transitioning of the remaining construction work to UCOR,” a company spokesperson said by email Friday.
The construction contract, which began in December 2018 and is now valued at $128-million, will not be extended beyond the Christmas day expiration date, a DOE spokesperson told Exchange Monitor by phone this week.
When awarded, the four-year, $92-million deal called for a facility that would be ready to treat mercury-laden water in 2022. The pact was extended more than once. Two industry executives told the Monitor this week, DOE was displeased with the rate of progress and decided not to stick with the APTIM team.
A third industry executive said DOE’s split with the APTIM-North Wind team has been in the works for some time, and the project’s transition to UCOR is well underway.
There has been “a lot of finger-pointing” between the APTIM-led team and the federal agency over the blame for slower-than-anticipated progress on the mercury treatment plant, two of the industry sources said.
As envisioned by DOE, the project is supposed to be the centerpiece of the Office of Environmental Management’s mercury cleanup efforts at Oak Ridge and the Y-12 National Security Complex. It would prevent mercury releases into the East Fork Poplar Creek and include a headworks facility linked by a mile-long pipe to a treatment plant.
But the APTIM-North Wind team ran into geologic problems early on during foundation construction, the Government Accountability Office said in a May 2022 report on big DOE infrastructure projects. “[T]he contractor found that the bedrock was closer to the surface than estimated, which required a redesign of certain elements of the project,” according to the report. “Construction at the headworks facility also produced more contaminated water than was initially estimated and a temporary water treatment system had to be added to the project scope.”
In spring of 2022, DOE said the project was about 40% complete. The total estimated cost for the project listed in DOE’s fiscal 2024 budget justification is $224-million. But due to “differing geological site conditions, the project is developing an updated baseline,” according to the justification document.
North Wind declined comment.
