Congress skipped town, and so did many other readers, but that didn’t stop news from breaking during the ExchangeMonitor’s annual August publication break. As chronicled in the Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, here are a few stories that we’ve been following.
Fluor Posts Job Ad For SRS Liquid Waste Work Ahead of Contract Award
Fluor Corp. has posted an online help-wanted advertisement connected to liquid waste management at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The company is not a member of the current liquid waste team at SRS, but is widely believed to have joined with Westinghouse Government Services to bid on the upcoming contract.
The job ad, posted earlier this month both on Fluor’s internal careers web page and Indeed.com, seeks a communications/public affairs lead for Savannah River liquid waste in Aiken, S.C.
Fluor teams with Honeywell and Stoller Newport News Nuclear in Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, management and operations contractor for the DOE facility. However, the job of management and disposal of roughly 35 million gallons of liquid waste from Cold War-era nuclear arms operations still falls to Savannah River Remediation (SRR): a partnership of AECOM, Bechtel, CH2M, and BWX Technologies.
The Energy Department in April extended SRR’s contract by six months, to Dec. 31. But there has been no word yet on the recipient of the next contract expected to be worth up to $6 billion over a decade.
Westinghouse Government Services on Wednesday referred questions regarding the job posting to Fluor, which did not respond to requests for comment by deadline Wednesday. The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, which oversees cleanup at the Savannah River Site, referred Weapons Complex Monitor to an Aug. 11 procurement update that forecasts the SRS liquid waste contract being awarded sometime from this month to October.
Westinghouse Government Services is a limited liability company that is legally distinct from the parent company’s bankruptcy filing earlier this year. Last year, Westinghouse Electric brought Fluor on as a construction subcontractor for two new reactors planned at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in South Carolina; that project was put on ice earlier this month by plant owners South Carolina Electric & Gas and Santee Cooper.
Hanford Air Samples Show Plutonium, Americium
Plutonium and americium have been found in high-volume air samples collected June 8 by Washington state at the Hanford Site’s Rattlesnake Barricade.
On June 8, Hanford personnel were ordered to take cover about 3 miles away at the Plutonium Finishing Plant after alarms for airborne contamination sounded during demolition of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility.
The state Department of Health received analysis results late Monday, and a memo was distributed Tuesday to Hanford workers telling them low levels of contamination had been detected. “The level is interesting from a regulatory point of view, but is not a health risk,” said Mike Priddy, manager of the Environmental Sciences Section of the Health Department’s Office of Radiation Protection.
The detection of airborne contamination at the Rattlesnake Barricade — where workers enter the secure area of Hanford from public Highway 240 — was unexpected, state and Department of Energy officials said at a Hanford Advisory Board committee meeting Tuesday. The wind was not blowing toward the barricade from the Plutonium Finishing Plant on June 8. The Health Department also found no contamination in air samples collected downwind of the plant at the Columbia River on June 8, state officials said.
“We are taking it seriously,” said Tom Teynor, federal project director for the plant. The Department of Energy and Department of Health are just beginning to investigate the findings at the Rattlesnake Barricade, and officials for both agencies said it is too soon to definitively conclude that the contamination originated at the Plutonium Finishing Plant.
When airborne contamination was detected June 8, no contamination was found on the skin or clothing of Hanford workers at the plant. However, workers were offered bioassay kits to check for internal contamination as a precaution. A small number of the first 65 bioassay tests analyzed have been positive for worker internal contamination, according to DOE and Hanford cleanup contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co.
CH2M characterized the positive results as showing a dose of 1 millirem or less over 50 years, calling it significantly less than a typical chest X-Ray.
Oak Ridge Resumes TRU Waste Shipments to WIPP
After five years, the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee has resumed shipping transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
The waste is largely from research and isotope production operations previously carried out at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to a press release from DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM). The material was due to be shipped in 2014, but WIPP stopped receiving waste transports following a fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February of that year.
“Resuming shipments has been an important priority for our program due to the large inventory of processed waste that is stored in onsite facilities. These shipments will remove risk from our site and help fulfill our commitments to the state of Tennessee,” Jay Mullis, acting manager of the Oak Ridge EM office, said in the release. “This was only possible through a lot of hard work from the federal and contractor employees here and support from staff in Carlsbad.”
The underground mine near the city of Carlsbad reopened in December and in April began receiving shipments from other DOE facilities, starting with the Idaho National Laboratory, Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and privately operated Waste Control Specialists complex in Texas.
Oak Ridge’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center has not sent treated waste to WIPP since 2012. This first shipment was comprised of 24 drums of contact-handled waste — specifically contaminated soil. It departed Oak Ridge by road on Aug. 9 and arrived at WIPP two days later, an OREM spokesman said.
“Currently, we are looking to conduct two shipments each month, and eventually the plan is to increase shipments to once a week,” the spokesman said by email.
Oak Ridge holds 1,740 cubic meters of transuranic waste awaiting shipment — 1,650 cubic meters of contact-handled waste and 90 cubic meters of remoted-handled material. There are 6,200 contact-handled drums, of which 679 have been certified for transport. Minimal amounts of new waste are produced at Oak Ridge through laboratory research, the spokesman said.
The Energy Department cannot speculate on how long it will take to ship out the waste, he added.
Perry Visits Hanford Site
Energy Secretary Rick Perry made his first trip to the Hanford Site on Tuesday, touring facilities that will be used to treat radioactive waste left over from Cold War-era plutonium production.
The former Texas governor walked through the Pretreatment Facility for the Waste Treatment Plant that Bechtel National is building to convert up to 56 million gallons of waste into a glass form that is safe for permanent storage. Speaking to Hanford Site workers, he also lauded the “great strides” being made in direct-feed low-activity waste, intended to enable treatment of such waste as early as 2022.
Perry’s trip to Richland, Wash., also included stops at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and HAMMER Federal Training Center.
Since taking office in March, Perry has visited a number of facilities in the DOE complex. During an at-times contentious budget hearing in June, he expressed his eagerness to walk around the Hanford Site, leading Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to note that the complex is quite large – 586 square miles.
During his trip Tuesday, Perry did not commit to sustain present funding levels for the massive Hanford cleanup program, the Tri-City Herald reported.
“I never get too spun up on initial budgets,” he said, according to KUOW. “What my goal is to make sure we have funding that gets the job done.”
The Energy Department’s budget proposal for fiscal 2018 would provide about $2.2 billion for the Hanford Site, not including security expenses. However, funding for DOE’s Richland Operations Office, which oversees remediation of the site’s River Corridor and Central Plateau, would be cut by $124 million, to $716 million. The Office of River Protection, charged with oversight of liquid waste operations, would get an extra $5 million, to $1.5 billion.
Appropriators in the House and Senate have sought to restore the funding for Hanford cleanup.
Jacobs, CH2M Earnings Rise Ahead of Merger
Less than a week after announcing their planned merger, Department of Energy contractors Jacobs Engineering and CH2M on Aug. 8 posted improved earnings figures in their latest quarterly reports.
Jacobs’ $3.27 billion acquisition of CH2M, scheduled to close by the end of the year, would significantly deepen the Dallas-based professional services company’s reach into the DOE complex. Understandably, the deal was a focus of executives’ comments during Jacobs’ quarterly earnings conference call.
“This strategic investment serves as the beginning of the next exciting chapter in the history of Jacobs and will significantly enhance opportunities in targeted high-growth industries and reinforce our drive to be a world premier global design, engineering, construction, operations and maintenance technical services firm,” Jacobs President and CEO Steven Demetriou told financial analysts.
Jacobs reported $2.5 billion in revenue for the fiscal third quarter ended June 30, which produced $89 million in net earnings ($0.74 per share). Revenue dipped a bit from $2.7 billion in third-quarter 2016, but net earnings were up significantly from last year’s $69.1 million ($0.57 per share).
Management said $3.5 million in net earnings ($0.02 per share) derived from professional service fees connected to the CH2M buyout.
Meanwhile, CH2M’s gross revenue changed little on a year-over-year basis: from $1.29 billion for the three months ended June 24, 2016, to $1.28 billion for the period ending June 30 of this year. However, operating income skyrocketed from a $14.1 million loss last year to a $72.6 million gain in 2017; net income rose from a $154.2 million loss to a $46.6 million gain.
Among its work across the DOE complex, CH2M heads environmental cleanup of the Central Plateau at Hanford, partners with AECOM to management remediation of the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, and leads the team that in May secured the contract for cleanup of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky.
Revenue in the company’s National Governments segment was also effectively frozen at roughly $481 million, according to the earnings report. The company took in additional revenue from federal consulting on U.S. nuclear cleanup, countered by lower volumes from a joint nuclear venture in Canada and the wrapping up of an environmental and nuclear consultancy in the United Kingdom.
In its 10-Q report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, CH2M said it is still waiting on a ruling from the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals regarding a $40.1 million fee claim for work done by a subsidiary that was the cleanup contractor at DOE’s Idaho site until 2016.
Jacobs’ DOE footprint is smaller than CH2M’s, but not negligible: It is a partner in Mission Support Alliance, which provides emergency services and other support activities at DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state. The company is also partnering with Honeywell and Stoller Newport News Nuclear on Mission Support and Test Services, which is transitioning into its new management and operations role for the Nevada National Security Site.
AECOM Govt. Biz Does Nicely in 3Q
AECOM’s earnings in its fiscal third quarter grew company-wide and in the business segment that provides services widely across the Department of Energy complex.
The quarter was highlighted by a $3.6 billion Air Force contract win in AECOM’s Management Services branch and a record $394 million in free cash flow, according to the Aug. 8 earnings release from the Los Angeles-based integrated services provider. Just days after the quarter ended, management announced the planned acquisition of Shimmick Construction.
Total revenue bumped up 3 percent year over year, to nearly $4.6 billion, for the quarter ended June 30. As reported operating income spiked by 88 percent, to $208 million; adjusted operating income rose by 9 percent, to $239 million. The net income numbers were slightly mixed: up 50 percent, to $101 million, on an as-reported basis; down 2 percent, to $123 million, on an adjusted basis.
AECOM’s contracts for federal agencies including DOE, Homeland Security, and the Defense Department, brought in $856 million in revenue in the quarter. Operating income rose from $55 million in third-quarter 2016 to $66 million this year; the rise for the adjusted income number was more modest: $76 million to $79 million.
“With the successful resolution of an incumbent protest at the GAO on a $3.6 billion Air Force win, we have now won nearly $7 billion of work this year, and our backlog has increased by nearly 50%,” Chairman and CEO Michael Burke said during the quarterly earnings conference call. “Our pipeline of pursuits remained high at over $40 billion, and we expect decisions on over $20 billion of bids over the next several quarters.”
Executives did not elaborate on potential award wins, but AECOM is waiting on several contract awards at DOE sites where it works.
The company has confirmed it is seeking the follow-on deal to the current liquid waste management contract for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. AECOM leads the incumbent, Savannah River Remediation. The contractor received a six-month extension in April, but there has been no word publicly regarding the winner of the upcoming contract award that could be worth up to $6 billion over a decade.
AECOM is one of the partners in Los Alamos National Security (LANS), management and operations contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico until Sept. 30, 2018; DOE last month issued a draft request for proposals for the next contract. LANS also holds a two-year, $230 million bridge contract for legacy cleanup operations at the nuclear-weapon laboratory. The contract expires on Sept. 30, but DOE has not yet announced the award for the follow-on deal, which could be valued at up to $1.5 billion over 10 years.
BWXT Revenue, Income Spike in 2Q
BWX Technologies on Monday reported revenue and income increases in the second quarter at the company-wide level and in the business segment that handles its Department of Energy contracts.
Revenue for the Lynchburg, Va., company came in at $410 million, 1.9 percent above the $402 million it collected in the same quarter of 2016, according to a press release issued after market close.
Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) quarterly operating income of $92.3 million rose from $88.5 million on a year-over-year basis; GAAP diluted earnings per share were up to $0.61 from $0.56 in that same time period. On a non-GAAP basis, earnings rose 16 percent from $72.4 million in second-quarter 2016 to $84.4 million in the latest reporting period. Non-GAAP earning per share rose 24 percent, from $0.45 to $0.56.
Segment revenue for BWXT Nuclear Services Group rose from $32.2 million in second-quarter 2016 to $44.8 million for 2017. Operating income grew from $4.4 million to $15.7 million. The company attributed the boost largely to the resolution of a contract dispute and higher activity in both domestic commercial nuclear maintenance outages and naval reactors decommissioning and decontamination. BWXT in May also picked up, with partners CH2M and Fluor, a contract worth up to $1.5 billion over a decade for cleanup of DOE’s Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky.
BWXT hiked its adjusted earnings projection for the year to $1.97 to $2.07 per share, from the prior $1.85 to $1.95.
S&K Retains Moab UMTRA Tech Assistance Work
S&K Logistics Services will stay on as the technical assistance provider for the Department of Energy’s Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) project in Utah, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) announced.
The Montana-based company won a five-year contract worth $20 million to $24.5 million, according to an Aug. 10 DOE EM press release. The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract could encompass firm-fixed-price and time-and-materials task orders.
The broad scope of work covered by the contract includes records management, training, safeguards and security, revegetation, property management, documentation support, and quality assurance.
The Moab cleanup program involves relocation of millions of tons of mill tailings and other material from the onetime uranium ore processing plant and nearby properties to a final disposal site at Crescent Junction, Utah. Cleanup contractor Portage Inc. is doing the work under a five-year, $156 million follow-on contract that lasts to Sept. 30, 2021.
S&K had provided technical assistance to the Moab UMTRA project for more than eight years as of last December, company President Dave Rariden said at the time. The company won the prior contract award in May 2012.
DOE EM said it received six proposals for the new contract, but did not identify the other bidders. A Dec. 14, 2016, pre-solicitation conference featured representatives from more than 30 organizations, including Wastren Advantage, Stoller Newport News Nuclear, Atkins, Enercon Federal Services, Navarro Research & Engineering, and Professional Project Services (Pro2Serve).
S&K is owned by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana. The company has been on a hot streak lately, in May taking home a contract valued at up to $17.4 million to provide technical and business assistance services for DOE EM’s Los Alamos Field Office in New Mexico.
UCOR Progressing on ETTP Poplar Creek Facilities Teardown
URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), the managing contractor for cleanup of the East Tennessee Technology Park at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site, is quickly moving forward on the teardown of the Poplar Creek facilities.
The facilities are a network of 23 buildings constructed in the 1940s and 1950s to support uranium enrichment operations at the old Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Since beginning demolition in mid-June, the contractor has already completely torn down two facilities: the K-832 Cooling Water Pumphouse and the K-832-H Cooling Tower.
The 5,500-square-foot cooling tower is one of the newer buildings at the site. It was constructed in 1985 to replace a Manhattan Project-era facility and operated for about one year.
The pumphouse was about twice the size of the cooling tower and recirculated cooling water through the plant’s uranium enrichment equipment from 1946 to 1985. The building was closed and repurposed to store equipment in 1985 when DOE ceased gaseous diffusion processes at Oak Ridge.
UCOR spokesman Mike Butler said demolition on the entirety of the Poplar Creek network is about 12 percent complete and nearing 75 percent deactivation. Deactivation is a hazard abatement process that entails removing leftover chemical or nuclear hazards such as asbestos, uranium, mercury, or lead.
“Each Poplar Creek facility has its own unique system, configuration, and facility design,” Butler said of the challenges in the network’s teardown. “Accounting for these differences can require additional time during the deactivation process as we work to identify and properly address all of the hazards to ensure work is accomplished safely.”
The demolition is part of the DOE Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management’s goal to by 2020 completely remediate and turn over the East Tennessee Technology Park for other uses, including a regional airport and a section of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park.
UCOR President Ken Rueter said last month the contractor is on track to complete the site turnover about $150 million under its original $2.5 billion budget.
To date, OREM has taken down more than 400 facilities at ETTP, including all five former uranium enrichment facilities. As buildings are demolished and their sites are decontaminated, UCOR turns them over to the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee (CROET) to reindustrialize the land for the city of Oak Ridge. CROET already oversees about 1,300 acres of the 2,200-acre park.
Idaho TRU Waste ‘Supercompactor’ Reaches Milestone
A key piece of technology at the Department of Energy’s Idaho site has in 100,000 hours of operation compacted over 238,000 containers of transuranic waste.
The “supercompactor” at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project compresses the 55-gallon drums into pucks just 5 to 7 inches thick, according to an Aug. 2 press release from site cleanup contractor Fluor Idaho. That has reduced by about 6,000 the number of truck transports that otherwise would have shipped close to 43,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
“It’s truly a unique asset in the DOE complex,” Jack Zimmerman, DOE Idaho Operations Office deputy director, said in the release. “Compacting the drums allows us to get a greater return on investment for each waste shipment sent from Idaho to WIPP. The supercompactor has paid for itself many times over considering the valuable space it has saved at WIPP and the number of truck shipments it has saved the taxpayer.”
The Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project was built to treat and repackage roughly 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste deposited at the Idaho site in the 1970s and 1980s. Waste retrieval wrapped up in early 2017, and as of March 8,500 cubic meters of waste still was awaiting processing. An updated figure was not immediately available Monday.
The Department of Energy has also been considering what to do with the facility once its present mission is completed. One option is to use it to treat waste from other DOE sites around the country.
North Wind Divides Management of Eastern Region
Department of Energy contractor North Wind Group is splitting management of its expanded eastern region of operations into northern and southern sectors.
North Wind manager Brent Clark will take over as northeast region manager, covering Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Delaware, and Wisconsin. He will remain in his position as deputy project manager and performance integration manager for Portsmouth Mission Alliance, according to an Aug. 8 North Wind press release.
Jeff Scott, North Wind’s eastern region manager since 2012, will assume the position of southeast region manager, covering Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
Under Scott’s management, the eastern region “has experienced significant growth and success,” North Wind spokeswoman Anne Smith said Friday by email. “In order to sustain the continued growth and provide operational support throughout the region, North Wind made the strategic decision to split the region into two regions.”
Mark Swantko will be business development manager for both eastern regions.
The management update is intended to ensure North Wind can serve its growing list of clients in the eastern United States, President and CEO Chris Leichtweis said in the release. He noted that the company has a new office in Chelmsford, Mass., and plans to open another office in Morgantown, W.Va., by the end of 2017.
North Wind is one of the parent companies of Portsmouth Mission Alliance, which in 2016 secured a five-year, $139.7 million infrastructure support services contract at DOE’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio. It has a presence at a number of other DOE locations, including the Idaho Site and Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
