On Tuesday the Department of Energy rolled out a draft solicitation for the next stage of remediation at the West Valley Demonstration Project in Western New York, a contract potentially worth $3 billion over a decade.
The new indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract would replace the existing pact held by a team of Jacobs and BWX Technologies team, CH2M Hill-BWXT West Valley. The incumbent contract began in August 2011, is valued at $989 million and expires Feb. 28, 2025.
Prospective bidders have until Oct. 2 to file written comments on the draft request for proposals (RFP). DOE plans to hold a pre-solicitation conference, site tour, and one-on-one sessions with potential industry suitors in late September.
Those sessions are currently scheduled Sept. 21-22 and Sept. 20 could be added if necessary, according to the draft RFP documents.
The new contract ordering period will be 10 years and will initially include a 120-day contract transition period followed by a 180-day implementation period task order. If DOE is pleased with the way things are going at the end of the 10-years, it can tack on an additional five years, according to the cover letter for the draft RFP.
DOE issued a request for information in February for what it calls Phase 1B of cleanup at the West Valley Demonstration Project.
Demolition of the Main Plant Processing Building, the last major facility standing at West Valley, started in September 2022 and is expected to conclude in 2025. Issues left to tackle in the coming years include digging up and remediating below-ground contamination and addressing underground tanks and groundwater plumes, according to DOE’s strategic vision for the site 35 miles south of Buffalo, N.Y.
There is also the matter of finding a disposal path for the transuranic waste or greater-than-class C waste at West Valley, DOE said in the same document. DOE has taken the position that waste from West Valley is not defense-related and cannot be sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico as transuranic waste. The Government Accountability Office in January 2021 called upon Congress to clarify a disposal path for the currently orphaned West Valley waste.
The West Valley contract will employ DOE’s End State Contracting Model where the agency first selects a contractor and, once that is done, works out “discrete scopes of work” via task orders, according to the solicitation material.
The cover letter also indicates DOE will use virtual online oral interviews with the key personnel identified by the bidder teams.
The 200-acre West Valley site, located within the Western New York Nuclear Service Center, is owned by the state but DOE has responsibility to remediate the site and also pays 90% of the cleanup costs. For six-years, ending in 1972, Nuclear Fuel Services ran a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at West Valley.
