Idaho-based North Wind Group got a three-year, $4.5-million task order for cleanup work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced the small-business set-aside award to North Wind this week in a press release.
The new task order was issued under an existing indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for Office of Environment Management work at Lawrence Livermore. The task order includes technical and administrative chores at Lawrence Livermore.
In addition to project management, North Wind will also support safety, environmental, quality and health programs Livermore.
The National Nuclear Security Administration is in the process of transferring high-risk process-contaminated retired facilities to the Office of Environmental Management for remediation, Mark Costella, Livermore’s legacy facility program manager for Livermore’s office of laboratory infrastructure, said during the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit on Sept. 9.
Fluor Idaho, the cleanup contractor for the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, will serve as mentor to an engineering services firm in Idaho Falls.
The remediation contractor announced in a Tuesday press release that it signed a mentor-protégé agreement with Walsh Engineering Services.
The owner and president of Walsh Engineering Services, Mark Pope, said in the release that the arrangement enables his firm to keep its core staff on the job while strengthening his company’s ability to compete for future federal business.
“Fluor Idaho has access to our 123 technical professionals, many of whom have extensive experience at Idaho Cleanup Project facilities and processes,” Pope said, adding that Walsh in turn will gain valuable information and training from Fluor Idaho’s project management and scheduling systems.
Pope bought Walsh Engineering less than two years ago after working as a design engineer at the Idaho National Laboratory for 20 years. The small firm employs architects, draftsmen and project managers with experience at several nuclear cleanup sites overseen by the DOE Office of Environmental Management.
“This Department of Energy program creates a unique partnership between us and the small business that provides the technical services that we desire,” said Fluor Idaho’s small business liaison Jennifer Lloyd.
The DOE mentor-protégé program operates separately from the Small Business Administration, but is designed to help small and disadvantaged firms develop a relationship with big contractors and break into the Department of Energy procurement market.
The Fluor affiliate has a $2-billion contract for remediation at the Idaho National Laboratory. The contract started in June 2016 and runs through May 2021. The DOE issued a request for proposals for a new Fluor contract in May.
The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina has completed its 8-gallon pilot shipment of wastewater to a private disposal site in West Texas under the agency’s new interpretation of high-level waste.
The shipment from the Savannah River Defense Waste Processing Facility to Waste Control Specialists in Andrew County, Texas, concluded Sept. 21, DOE said in a recent press release.
Under the reinterpretation, the department says that not all high-level waste poses enough risk to demand disposal in a deep underground repository, such as the stalled Yucca Mountain Project in Nevada.
The DOE says the eight gallons of wastewater from the Savannah River Site vitrification plant is no more radioactive than certain equipment used in hospitals or in the petroleum industry. At WCS the material will be mixed with a concrete-like grout and disposed of as non-high- level waste.
Waste Control Specialists was chosen for the pilot shipment in part because it is already licensed to accept Class B low-level radioactive waste.
In August, the DOE issued a finding of no significant impact from the pilot shipment. Eventually, the department could move up to 10,000 gallons of such wastewater from Savannah River to private disposal locations, although it has published no actual plans yet.
The DOE published its re-interpretation of the high-level waste rule in June 2019 after receiving more than 5,000 public comments. The agency said for decades it has managed nearly all reprocessing waste streams as high-level regardless of radioactive risk, and wants to get away from a one-size fits all approach.
