With the Department of Energy working to shift responsibility for the remaining legacy cleanup work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Office of Environmental Management from the National Nuclear Security Administration, EM is looking at needing 18-to-24 months to compete and award new “incentive-based” cleanup contracts for the lab, according to a plan WC Monitor obtained yesterday. The Oct. 29 plan, marked as “pre-decisional,” outlines a draft “transition plan” for the shift of the Los Alamos cleanup, which also envisions a continued role for the lab in cleanup activities in the near-term. NNSA and EM are working to submit a final transition plan to the Secretary of Energy by mid-November. The NNSA did not respond to a request for comment on the draft plan as of press time yesterday.
To aid in the acquisition planning for the new Los Alamos cleanup contracts, EM plans to “non-competitively” award by the end of 2015 a small business contract to cover activities such as evaluation of acquisition alternatives, development of an acquisition strategy and scope statements, according to the draft plan. EM also plans to compete and award before the end of Fiscal Year 2015 a separate architecture and engineering contract to help “guide” the remaining Los Alamos legacy cleanup. “The scope of this A&E may include broad integration activities, owner’s representative, design activities, safety planning, review and oversight,” the draft plan says. Also during the transition period, EM is considering using existing contracting vehicles, such as the nationwide Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity cleanup contracts to perform “small, severable work segments,” the draft plan says. “Such opportunities to break away small scope elements may provide advantages such as gradual ramp down of work scope currently included within the LANL M&O contract and … early experience encountering and resolving key transition and interface issues,” the draft plan says.
In the near-term, NNSA and EM plan to negotiate a bilateral contract modification with LANS to allow LANS to contract separately with EM and to move all legacy environmental cleanup scope out of the NNSA contract for the lab. “This change is … to be completed as quickly as practical and may occur as soon as December 2015,” the draft plan says. Once the bilateral modification is complete, EM will execute a “non-competitive contract” with LANS “the scope and terms of which will be as similar to the current terms as practical,” the draft plan says. “This is necessary to minimize worker and site-wide impacts, facilitate ease of transition and minimize impact to ongoing, regulatory driven cleanup activities,” the draft plan says.
If the contract modifications with LANS can’t be reached, EM could move forward with a non-competive approach to provide for the possible transition of the legacy cleanup scope in Fiscal Year 2015, the draft plan says. “This strategy includes the following elements: a justification for other than full and open competition process; Secretarial approval of the JOFOC; notification to Congress and requisite holding period; parallel market research via a sources sought publication; discussions and award to a qualified prime EM contractor other than LANS and its corporate partners,” the draft plan says.