The Department of Energy said in an online notice Tuesday it is awarding the new remediation contract at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee to an Amentum-Jacobs team called United Cleanup Oak Ridge LLC in a deal potentially worth $8.3 billion over a 10-year ordering period.
United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR), won the Oak Ridge Reservation Cleanup Contract over five other bidders, and bears more than a passing resemblance to the incumbent URS/CH2M Hill Oak Ridge (UCOR), another Amentum-Jacobs partnership.
The formal lineup of the new team is Amentum, Jacobs and Honeywell International. The new UCOR’s teaming subcontractors are RSI EnTech, Strata-G, Longnecker & Associates and Environmental Alternatives.
Since August 2011, the cleanup contract at the site has been held by the current Amentum-Jacobs partnership. The existing deal, now valued at $4.2-billion, is set to expire Jan. 31, 2022. But DOE has an additional option for six months that could still be exercised to keep vintage UCOR on through July 2022, according to a DOE Office of Environmental Management press release.
The new single-award, indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract could eventually extend 15 years — the 10-year ordering period plus another five years for additional task orders, Amentum said in its own press release. The DOE option to tack five years onto the end of the 10-year ordering period is a feature of the agency’s end state contracting model, procurement officials at the Office of Environmental Management have said in various public forums.
In addition to continuing remediation at the old uranium enrichment area, the new contractor will perform environmental clean-up at the Y-12 National Security Complex and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This includes decommissioning and demolition of excess facilities at the federal complex and designing, building and operating the new onsite disposal landfill at Oak Ridge, the Environmental Management Disposal Facility.
The DOE issued its final request for proposals for the Oak Ridge contract in December 2020. Sources told Weapons Complex Monitor earlier this year that one of the rival teams was made up of APTIM, BWX Technologies and Westinghouse. Other companies who were interested enough to attend a virtual industry briefing on the contract in September 2020 included Atkins, Bechtel, CDM Smith, EnergySolutions, Fluor, Huntington Ingalls, Leidos, Los Alamos Technical Associates, Navarro Research and Engineering, North Wind Group, Orano, Parsons, Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Spectra Tech, Veolia and Waste Control Specialists.
