The Department of Energy is just days from sealing a one-year extension for the management and operations contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a senior official said Monday.
“As you know the M&O contract expires on 31 July and any day now we’ll have an extension signed,” Michael Budney, manager of DOE’s Savannah River Operations Office, said during a meeting of the federally chartered Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board. “It better be any day now that we have that extension signed to take that contract out for another year as we go through the solicitation process.”
Incumbent Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is approaching the end of the last option period for a contract worth $9.5 billion. The contractor is led by Fluor, with partners Stoller Newport News Nuclear and Honeywell.
There was no word at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor on whether the extension had been sealed.
The contract covers management of the Savannah River National Laboratory, some environmental remediation missions (though not liquid waste management, a separate contract currently held by Savannah River Remediation), and operating nuclear-material facilities for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA).
Further details of the contract extension were not immediately available. The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, which oversees the contract, said it does not comment on active procurements.
The Office of Environmental Management has not yet issued a draft request for proposals for the next management and operations contract. The next step is an Aug. 1 DOE “technical workshop” in Augusta, Ga., covering the scope of work covered by the contract, according to Budney. The intent is to “make sure all the potential bidders understand what we do that this site,” he said.
Separately, Budney told the board the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) decision to study transferring some $300 million in annual defense nuclear materials operations to Tennessee from South Carolina is “routine.”
“This is just a routine kind of process we always go through, especially where there’s different new leadership about looking at doing an evaluation of how things operate and what’s the best way to do it and what’s the most efficient means,” he said during the webcast meeting. “We routinely do this at all the places where DOE has a shared site between EM [DOE’s Office of Environmental Management] and NNSA,” Budney added.
In the June 29 memo to which Budney referred — first published by Weapons Complex Morning Briefing — NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said the agency was forced to “reevaluate the viability to execute enduring missions at the Savannah River Site” after a federal judge temporarily blocked cancellation of construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility and converting the plant for production of plutonium nuclear warhead triggers.
Among other things, Gordon-Hagerty wrote in the memo, that means studying whether to move the Savannah River Site’s tritium processing mission, currently managed by the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, to the Y-12 National Security Complex, currently managed by the Bechtel-led Consolidated Nuclear Security. The Y-12 manager has an option in its contract to take over the work.
The NNSA working group Gordon-Hagerty convened will also look at changing the contract structure at the Savannah River Site, including having the NNSA taking over landlordship of the site from DOE EM. That might involve the NNSA taking over the site’s H-Canyon chemical separations facility, along with the national lab, Budney said.