Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said this week he has been unable to persuade the White House to take a direct interest in addressing findings of off-site radiological contamination near the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth cleanup project in his state.
“I’ve begged the Department of Energy and I tried to get the president of the United States to have any interest in this and we’ve gotten no interest from the president and some interest from the Department of Energy,” Brown told Columbus, Ohio, NBC affiliate WCMH on Monday.
In a statement Tuesday, Brown emphasized the need for a neutral third-party to conduct sampling in the area, which DOE has already agreed to fund. “I am working to make sure it’s done right. DOE has a responsibility to show that ongoing work at the site doesn’t present a public health risk to the community or the workforce on site,” Brown said.
In a similar message, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said he has worked with DOE and Ohio health and environmental agencies to understand the data collected to date “and to ensure the safety and health of the residents, families, and workers of the Piketon community.”
There was no comment from the Energy Department and White House this week on the senators’ comments.
Local officials in May closed the Zahn’s Corner Middle School in nearby Piketon prior to the end of the academic year, and will keep it closed for the 2019-2020 year, after DOE and Northern Arizona University reported finding at least trace levels of neptunium-237 and americium-241 on and near the site. The Energy Department has said the amounts are well below posing a threat to human health.
The federal agency conducted further sampling over the Memorial Day weekend. Details on selection of the third-party sampling contractor were not available at deadline.
The joint venture charged with environmental remediation of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site received all but about $600,000 of its potential performance fee for the first six months of fiscal 2019.
The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) sent the latest performance evaluation for URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) on Monday.
The contractor earned over $4.9 million of a potential $5.6 million for the period from Oct. 1, 2018, to March 31, 2019, according to a letter from Jay Mullis, OREM manager, to Ken Rueter, president and project manager at UCOR. That broke down to over $2.4 million for the project management incentive and slightly more than $2.5 million for the cost and schedule incentive.
The Energy Department overall rated UCOR “very good” for project management, broken down into excellent rankings for project management and business systems and regulatory and stakeholder activity, along with a good rating for operations management. The contractor was given “high confidence” in the cost and schedule category.
“During this six-month performance rating period, UCOR has continued to successfully conduct Environmental Management operations, and efficiently advance and complete cleanup projects that reduced risks at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12),” Mullis wrote.
The letter lists 26 specific accomplishments during the evaluation period, including: stronger worker productivity and cost reduction in teardown of Building K-1037 at the former uranium enrichment complex; support for site preparation for the Mercury Treatment Facility; exceeding the small business subcontracting goal of 65%, for a total of 81.1%; and inspecting close to 20 facilities at Oak Ridge following a nearby earthquake in January 2018, with no damage found
Mullis noted 11 areas for improvement, including: maintenance concerns dating back more than two years regarding gates at White Oak Dam; “incidents involving equipment operation related to consistent application of its work planning and control program”; and ongoing issues connected to electrical safety, lockout/tagout, and respirator use.
UCOR holds a $2.7 billion contract through July 2020 for decontamination, demolition, and other environmental remediation operations at Oak Ridge.
“UCOR’s 95 percent composite fee score is a testament to the talent and dedication of our safety-focused work force. We are proud of the numerous accomplishments that DOE noted in its determination, such as decreasing project costs, exceeding small business goals, and operating without permit infractions or reportable releases,” Rueter said in a prepared statement. “As a company focused on continuous improvement, we also appreciate the constructive feedback that DOE provided in this assessment. We will continue being good stewards of the taxpayer dollars we receive by identifying efficiencies and focusing on quality performance. Most importantly, we will continue making safety a prerequisite for any task that we perform.”
LATA-Atkins Technical Services, a team including Atkins and Los Alamos Technical Associates, said this week it won a potentially 7.5-year waste-management subcontract from Y-12 National Security Complex operator Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS).
The team also includes a small business, Strata-G, which has previously worked on liquid- and solid-waste management at the nation’s primary uranium processing site.
The new, competitively awarded small-business-set-aside Waste Management Services subcontract features a 2.5-year base and five one-year options. Consolidated Nuclear Security declined to say how much the contract is potentially worth.
The pact covers cleanup of liquid and solid “waste generated from production processes and project activities at all facilities at the Y-12 National Security Complex” in Tennessee, a CNS spokesperson wrote Thursday in an email.
The LATA-Atkins deal also marks the first time CNS has combined its solid- and liquid-waste cleanup subcontracts. Navarro Research and Engineering is the incumbent on the current solid waste contract, while Atkins Technical Services handles the liquid waste. Both the Navarro and Atkins subcontracts expire June 30, CNS said.
“In acquisition planning, we determined that it would be more efficient to combine the two contracts,” the CNS spokesperson said.
Atkins inherited the expiring liquid-waste contract after it acquired the projects, products, and technology branch of nuclear services firm EnergySolutions in 2016.
Consolidated Nuclear Security is a Bechtel National-led company that manages the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Y-12 site in Tennessee, along with its affiliated nuclear-weapon assembly and disassembly facility, the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. At Y-12, CNS machines existing highly enriched uranium into forms usable in nuclear weapons.
Atkins and Los Alamos Technical Associates are each players in the Department of Energy nuclear-waste business.
Atkins is a member of Washington River Protection Solutions, which manages the radioactive liquid-waste tank farm at the Hanford Site in Washington state: DOE’s shuttered, Cold War-era plutonium production site.
Atkins, owned by Canada’s SNC-Lavalin since 2017, also leads treatment of depleted uranium hexafluoride at DOE’s Portsmouth and Paducah sites: former uranium enrichment campuses in Piketon, Ohio, and Paducah, Ky., respectively.
Among other things, Los Alamos Technical Associates is currently a subcontractor to Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos: the DOE Environmental Management office’s cleanup contractor for Cold War nuclear-waste remediation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico.
