Winner of $45B Hanford prize questions eligibility of contract challenger

The winner of a massive Department of Energy liquid-waste cleanup contractor in Washington state is trying to turn the tables on a rival who has argued in court that the awardee was ineligible for the work.

The winner, BWX Technologies (BWXT)-led Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure, told the U.S. Court of Claims for the Federal Circuit that plaintiff Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance itself might not have been properly registered with a contract procurement tracking system if the rival’s “own uncompromising” legal arguments are applied.

In a lawsuit filed in May, Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance said the BWXT-led group should lose the $45 billion liquid-waste cleanup deal at Hanford because, among other things, the company was not registered in a federal procurement database at the time of the award.

Now, the winning bidder, which also includes Amentum and Fluor, says that Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance ran afoul of the law by revising its System for Award Management (SAM) registration after submitting its final revised offer for the Hanford Integrated Tanks Contract but before DOE made its award. The change made Atkins Nuclear Secured, a U.S. affiliate company, the primary owner of the joint venture, which was previously owned by SNC-Lavalin of Montreal, Canada.

“If that change is true, it means HTDA ’s [Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance]’s offer materially changed in a manner that made it unacceptable,” the BWXT group said in the filing. Alternatively, the winner said, if SNC-Lavelin is still the losing bidder’s parent company, the team violated federal law by failing to disclose its foreign ownership.

“The legal consequence of this lapse would be that HTDA’s protest cannot stand,” according to the filing by BWXT’s Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure group. “As recognized in this context of a mutual SAM failings, “[t]here has been no prejudice when a bid protestor benefited from the same potentially unlawful discretion from which the awardee benefited.”

Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance, which also includes Jacobs and Westinghouse, said the contract winner’s legal argument is without merit and that SNC-Lavalin remains the corporate parent of Atkins and has been since 2017. An “administrative error” in March of this year led the joint venture to list Atkins Nuclear as the “highest level owner” of the team bidding on the Hanford waste contract.

While an error occurred in Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance’s SAM registration, it remained registered with the tracking system throughout the Hanford procurement. This is not the same as Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure’s failure to remain registered in the SAM system, the plaintiff said. The claims court should avoid any “misguided comparison” between the two, and award the business to plaintiff Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance, according to the filing.