As of December, roughly 70% or 11.2 million of the 16 million tons of contaminated debris and soil had been hauled away from an old uranium mill outside Moab, Utah, according to data released by the Department of Energy last week in for a new contract for the project.
The DOE in February released its request for proposals for the $614-million small business set-aside for the Moab Remedial Action Contract. A five-year contract valued at $187 million is held by North Wind Portage.
North Wind is currently shipping up to 152 containers per train, four trains per week as it moves tailings from the old Atlas Moab site in Grand County to the engineered Crescent Junction waste disposal facility 30 miles away.
Idaho-based North Wind says on its website that it is excavating and reducing the size of debris buried in the Moab pile from old mill buildings and structures. The material is loaded into intermodal containers and shipped by rail to Crescent Junction. North Wind has also built the disposal cell expansions at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission disposal cells at the Crescent Junction landfill where the material is disposed of.
The Atlas Moab site entrance is about 1 mile south of the main entrance to Arches National Park. The groundwater at the Moab site must also be remediated.
Questions on the solicitation were due Feb. 19. Bids on the project are due March 29.
Germantown, Md.-based Amentum recently marked its first full year as a privately-held company after being spun off by Los Angeles-based AECOM.
On Jan. 31, 2020, AEMCOM closed on the $2.4 billion sale of its AECOM Management Services division to affiliates of New York-based investment firms Lindsay Goldberg and American Securities LLC. The new owners re-christened the company as Amentum, a Greek term for a leather strap that helps propel a javelin.
With the sale, the Department of Energy contractor is no longer traded on the stock market, joining Bechtel as another privately held provider of services to the weapons complex. By contrast, companies such as BWX Technologies, Fluor and Jacobs are publicly traded.
Amentum is the lead partner on joint ventures such as the prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, and the cleanup contractor at locations such as the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee as well as liquid waste contractors for the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Amentum also leads the Central Plateau Cleanup Co. at Hanford.
Amentum reviewed its first year of work outside AECOM in a Feb. 10 press release.
Amentum and some of its subsidiary companies also perform government services that are not discussed much publicly. Three years ago, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the then-AECOM briefly advertised for flight attendants for a private air shuttle service, dubbed “Janet Airlines” which is said to run between the McCarran International Airport and the so-called “Area 51” national security site in the Nevada desert.
