The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management on Thursday published its potential $100-million solicitation for a new waste haulage contract for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
CAST Specialty Transportation has the current five-year, $112-million contract, set to expire May 27, 2022, for moving transuranic material from DOE generator sites to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad. The follow-on award will be a small-business set-aside contract.
The incumbent trucking company has terminals in Carlsbad, Richland, Wash., Tennessee and Colorado, according to its website.
The final request for proposals (RFP) for the WIPP Transportation Services contract was posted on a DOE procurement website. Questions on the RFP are due by 11:59 PM Eastern Time on June 27, and should be emailed to wipptransportation@emcbc.doe.gov.
Responses to the request for proposals are due July 26, according to the cover letter for potential bidders.
The new agreement will be a single-award Indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract, utilizing fixed-price task orders, which might include separate contract line item numbers, according to the RFP. The contract will also include a 60-day transition period.
More than two-dozen people, representing 16 organizations including the incumbent, took part in a March 30 virtual briefing on the draft RFP. Other attendes included representatives of Hittman Transport Services, Spire Creative Solutions, TFE Inc., and TMW Inc, according to documents published online.
The DOE came out with the transport RFP one week after posting its solicitation for a potential 10-year, $3-billion contract for management and operation of WIPP.
The prime contract for the underground transuranic waste disposal site is currently held by Nuclear Waste Partnership, an Amentum-BWX Technologies partnership. Its agreement, currently valued at $2.7 billion, started in October 2012 and is currently scheduled to expire in September. But the DOE’s budget request justification for the Office of Environmental Management said to expect the incumbent to be extended for at least six more months, into early 2022.