The Energy Department has picked up a two-year option to keep North Wind Solutions in charge of the Transuranic Waste Processing Center at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee through October 2020.
An Energy Department spokesperson confirmed Monday the department in October exercised its option to the original three-year base period. The entire five-year agreement has a potential value of about $163 million.
The subsidiary of Idaho-based North Wind Group in January earned 97 percent of its potential fee for work conducted during the third year of its contract, which ended in late October 2018.
North Wind processes, packages, and ships transuranic waste from Oak Ridge to the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. This includes both contact-handled TRU waste and the more radioactive remote-handled TRU waste. The firm also processes certain low-level waste and mixed-low-level waste for disposal.
Most of the waste processed comes from cleanup and operations at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Some of it is generated by BWX Technologies-owned Nuclear Fuel Services in Tennessee, which makes nuclear fuel for the U.S. Navy and other customers.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management has set up a website devoted to providing information on the end state contracting model.
The end states method, as defined in December special notice from the DOE cleanup office, is a single-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contracting approach with the flexibility to cover both cost-reimbursement and firm-fixed-price task orders within the award. The agency will competitively award contracts through a two-step process, in which a vendor is picked and then negotiations are held for future task orders. Proponents have said this concept should better allow the Energy Department and its contractors to adjust to changing cleanup needs at a given site.
“This IDIQ contract construct provides EM the needed flexibility to task its contractors using a risk-based approach to better define discrete scopes of work for site closure or end states,” according to the website. Through this additional flexibility, and the higher potential fees it can award to contractors, DOE hopes the approach will accelerate cleanup and reduce its environmental liability.
The contracting model has been championed, before both federal contractors and the Government Accountability Office, by Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White. The method is also consistent with contract reform efforts by Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, according to EM.
The Energy Department plans to apply an end states approach to seven solicitations now in the pipeline: Hanford Site Central Plateau Cleanup in Washington state, Hanford Tank Closure, Oak Ridge Reservation Cleanup in Tennessee, Nevada Environmental Program Services, Portsmouth Decontamination and Decommissioning in Ohio, West Valley Phase 1B Cleanup in upstate New York, and the Idaho Cleanup Project.
