The Department of Energy could solicit bids for long-term management and storage of elemental mercury in January, the Office of Environmental Management said in a procurement update after Christmas.
After court action by gold mining companies forced DOE to drop earlier plans to designate Waste Control Specialists in West Texas as its preferred long-term storage site under the Mercury Export Ban Act of 2008, the agency rolled out a new request for information in October 2020.
Then, on Dec. 27, the DOE Environmental Management (EM) office said the final request for proposals (RFP) for elemental mercury storage could come as soon as January.
The Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico has retained California-based Tetra Tech to work on a supplemental environmental impact statement and related documents for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The agreement for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) documents is potentially worth $1.8-million, according to a Dec. 27 task order award notice in the federal procurement website, SAM.gov.
Tetra Tech will provide support services for National Environmental Policy Act studies and related documents, according to the notice. The notice said a request for quotes was issued prior to the award to Tetra Tech.
Based in Pasadena, California, Tetra is an international engineering and consulting company. WIPP is the nation’s only underground disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste.
The Department of Energy plans to extend its existing business agreement by one year with a contractor doing studies to support the federal agency’s remediation at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California, according to a procurement notice published Dec. 16.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management published a justification on SAM.gov for extending a longstanding task order with CDM Smith by 12 months to Dec. 31, 2022, at the Energy Technology Engineering Center (ETEC) at Santa Susana. The value of the extension is roughly $4 million and brings the total value of the task order, which dates back to October 2012 to $40 million.
CDM Smith, headquartered in Boston, works on federal and state reports to support cleanup of remaining contamination within the DOE-run Area IV of the 2,850-acre Santa Susana research site. DOE last extended CDM in 2020.
The DOE carried out decades of nuclear energy and related liquid-metal technology research at reactors at Santa Susana in Ventura County. Boeing and NASA are the other entities responsible for remediating Santa Susana under the oversight of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.
CDM has already worked with the state to develop a groundwater corrective measure study. The state, meanwhile, is in the final stages of developing its California Environmental Quality Act review: a document required to begin final cleanup. The actual remediation for DOE is being done by North Wind Group, which finished demolishing DOE structures in 2021.
President Joe Biden signed the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law on Dec. 27.
The NDAA authorized the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management to spend $6.84 billion, as requested, for Defense Environmental Cleanup at shuttered nuclear-weapon production sites. Defense Environmental Cleanup is the biggest of the three main Environmental Management budget lines.
