Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth has pushed back by up to six months the date for rendering the Energy Department’s 60 year-old X-326 uranium enrichment building cold and dark, according to a senior company executive.
“[O]ur goal in the X-326 is to be ‘cold & dark’ by the end of this calendar year,” Dennis Carr, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s program director, wrote in a Jan. 30 memo to personnel at the DOE site in Piketon, Ohio. Weapons Complex Monitor obtained a copy of the memo.
The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant’s X-326 building enriched uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War and later for reactors. The facility must be torn down by the end of Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s second contract-option period and was supposed to be cold and dark — disconnected and isolated from all sources of electricity — by June.
This is the second delay for that X-326 milestone since 2015, when Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth pushed the deactivation date to June 2017 from March 2016.
Under the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant decontamination and decommissioning contract DOE awarded the company in 2010, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth would forfeit some of its available award fee for missing the X-326 deactivation milestone. According to the contract, DOE would dock 20 percent of the available award fee if the cold-and-dark milestone is two months late. The penalty for a six-month delay was not immediately clear.
DOE has heavily modified Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s contract since its 2010 award. The pact initially included a five-year option period, which the agency split in half last year at the end of the five-year base period. At the time, DOE said Fluor-BWXT had “room for improvement” and that the agency wanted “to evaluate the effectiveness of program improvements while also promoting accountability and incentivizing excellent performance.”
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s contract was worth some $2 billion over 10 years when it officially started in 2011. The pact is now worth up to $3 billion or so through March 2021, including the pair of two-and-a-half-year options.
Meanwhile, the X-326 project got another jolt this week as a senior executive with a major site subcontractor abruptly left his post.
Robert Kury, CH2M’s vice president for nuclear liabilities decommissioning and dismantling program management, had been running day-to-day operations in the X-326 building until late last month, when he “left the project to attend to personal matters,” Carr wrote in the Jan. 30 memo reviewed by Weapons Complex Monitor.
A CH2M spokesperson would not confirm whether Kury was still employed by the company.
Around the same time DOE split the options on Fluor BWXT Portsmouth’s contract, the conglomerate brought CH2M on as a subcontractor at the site.
