Contractors and the U.S. Department of Justice filed extensive legal arguments in federal appeals court last week in a dispute over a Department of Energy liquid waste contract potentially worth $45 billion over a decade at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
Two teams, one headed by BWX Technologies and another by AtkinsRéalis Nuclear, have together with the government, filed more than 150 pages of legal papers with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, since March 18.
The losing bidder — both in the original April 2023 award and the agency’s more recent Feb. 29 re-award — is Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance. The Alliance is a team of Atkins, Jacobs and Westinghouse.
In its March 18 filing, the Atkins team says U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Marian Blank Horn was correct in ruling last June that BWXT-led Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure was ineligible for the contract due to failure to stay registered in a federal procurement tracking system. The legal dispute concerns only the first DOE award from 2023, not the re-award from last month.
DOE on Feb. 29 announced it would re-award the Hanford Integrated Tank Disposition Contract to the BWX Technologies-led group, Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure. The joint venture, which also includes Amentum and Fluor, has in past filings said its failure to stay registered with the System for Award Management (sam.gov) is a mere technical error and not a fatal flaw.
A DOE contracting officer in October 2023 agreed the lapse in registration was a fixable mistake.
“DOE’s evaluation of the two proposals was very close,” said the AtkinsRéalis-led group. The actual contract prices are confidential, according to the filing. But the Court of Federal Claims “has already correctly determined that HTDA [Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance] succeeded on the merits, according to the Alliance.
The AtkinsRéalis-led group goes on to say it “would lose the reasonable opportunity to compete fairly for the contract” if BWXT-led Hanford Tank Waste Operations and Closure is allowed to keep the liquid waste contract.