The Department of Energy on Wednesday kicked off procurement of the next Savannah River Site management and operations contract with a request for information from industry about the award that will fund the Aiken, S.C., facility’s biggest nuclear-weapons programs.
The agency will sort out the value, duration, and exact form of the contract after hearing back from industry. The pact will replace the contract now held by the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), which is set to expire Sept. 30, 2021 and has only a single, one-year option left, after that. That deal, first awarded in 2008 and since extended, is worth a little less than $15 billion.
According to DOE’s request for information, the follow-on management and operations contract will include many of the activities covered in the incumbent’s current contract: landlord duties such as maintenance and building operations, cybersecurity, a limited amount of solid-waste cleanup, and transuranic waste compliance.
The next site-management accord, though, will not include management of the Savannah River National Laboratory. The DOE Office of Environmental Management, which owns Savannah River, is splitting lab management into its own 10-year contract, worth nearly $4-billion.
The national security motherload on the successor contract to SRNS will be construction and operation of the Savannah River Site’s planned plutonium-pit production plant, the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, and construction of the new tritium harvesting facility, the Tritium Finishing Facility.
The new management and operations contract will also make Savannah River the administrative nexus of the Surplus Plutonium Disposition that has replaced the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s means of permanently deweaponizing 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium via the dilute-and-dispose method: chemically weakening the plutonium, converting it to an oxide, blending it with an inert mixture, and shipping it off to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for deep-underground burial.
Even with the revenue from the national lab excised from the landlord contract, a deal this large has a scent strong enough to bring every defense-nuclear-capable contractor to the yard, one industry source said. According to this person, the major players around the DOE complex have been sizing one another up as potential teammates or competitors on the Savananh River management and operations contract since early in the year.
Among the big DOE nuclear contracts are: Amentum, the former AECOM Management Services; Atkins; Bechtel National; BWX Technologies; Honeywell, Fluor; Huntington Ingalls Industries; and Jacobs.
Editor’s note, 08/06/2020, 6:04 p.m. the story was updated with the correct expiration date for the incumbent’s contract.
