DESPITE RFP UNCERTAINTY, DOE SAYS IT WILL AWARD TWPC CONTRACT BY EARLY 2015

While the schedule for the release of a Request for Proposal for the new contract to manage Oak Ridge’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center is currently uncertain, the Department of Energy still expects to award the new contract before the current contract held by Wastren Advantage expires in early 2015, Mark Whitney, manager of the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, said yesterday. “We don’t know the exact date and time an RFP will be issued, but we are working towards the January date when the current contract expires,” Whitney said at a House Cleanup Caucus briefing on Oak Ridge. “We are getting close to that date. The SEB [Source Evaluation Board] is making a lot of progress and we’re still shooting for January 2015 for an award of the follow-on contract. We’ll see if we get there, but that’s our anticipation at this point,” he said.

Last fall, DOE issued a sources sought notice to help identify if small businesses are available to operate the Oak Ridge TWPC, which is used to prepare contact- and remote-handled transuranic waste for off-site disposal. Since then, however, there has been little public action on the procurement. On the sidelines of yesterday’s briefing, Whitney said DOE still intends to set aside the new operations contract for small business.