The Department of Energy has paused rollout of a solicitation for a 10-year, $14-billion contract to manage the Savannah River Site for most of the next decade, pending an internal review that could radically reshape the nuclear-weapon mission at the South Carolina facility.
The agency announced the move late on Oct. 5 in a post to a federal procurement website. Further work on the solicitation for the next Savannah River management contract now will be postponed until early 2019: around the time DOE initially thought it would release a final solicitation, according to the notice.
That is how long DOE thinks its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) — the steward of the U.S. nuclear-weapon stockpile — will need to wrap up a review of how, and whether, to keep doing nuclear-weapon work at Savannah River.
“The DOE is postponing action on the Draft RFP pending a Departmental decision on the joint National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)/Office of Environmental Management Study regarding the future scope of NNSA activities at SRS. A decision is expected in early calendar year 2019,” the agency said in the FedBizOps post.
Comments on the draft solicitation were due Sept. 21, and it was not clear at deadline Friday whether industry would be invited to comment again after the NNSA’s review is finished.
The notice appeared a little more than a month after DOE released a draft solicitation for the next contract to manage Savannah River’s eponymous national laboratory, select environmental remediation operations, and certain NNSA weapons missions. In particular, Savannah River is where the NNSA processes tritium for insertion into nuclear warheads and bombs.
The NNSA decided to review its weapons mission at Savannah River after the state of South Carolina and its U.S. congressional delegation resisted plans to manufacture nuclear-warhead cores at the site.
In a memo first published by Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor’s affiliate publication, Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said that if it could not make plutonium “pits” at Savannah River, the agency might leave the site altogether, or contemplate taking over landlordship of the site from DOE’s cleanup office.
In the memo, Gordon-Hagerty said it expected an interim briefing about the review from officials with the NNSA and the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management by Sept. 27, with a final briefing by mid-December. An NNSA spokesperson would not say Friday whether the interim briefing took place as scheduled.
“The Department is committed to an enduring mission for the Savannah River Site,” the NNSA spokesperson wrote in an email. “To that end, DOE/NNSA is continuing its review of all available options for successfully executing national security missions alongside environmental management activities at the site.”
Meanwhile, incumbent site manager Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is on the job through July 31, 2019, under a contract modification signed this summer.
