The Department of Energy this week released a draft solicitation for a Savannah River Site management and operations contract that could be worth nearly $15 billion over 10 years, including construction of new tritium facilities to power up U.S. nuclear weapons.
Interested parties can meet DOE officials on site for two days of one-on-one meetings and a site tour beginning Sept. 17, a week after the original schedule, the agency said in documents posted online Tuesday. The department will accept comments on the draft Savannah River Site Operations Post Fiscal Year 2018 solicitation until Sept. 27 and expects to issue a final contract solicitation in January. Fluor-led incumbent Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is on the job through July 31, 2019.
The next Savannah River Site management and operations contract is expected to cover the same work the incumbent is doing now, including: management of site’s eponymous national laboratory, which mostly develops technology for Cold War nuclear weapons cleanup managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management; National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)-funded tritium processing; and a limited amount of waste cleanup.
The contractor would also, under the draft solicitation, be required to “develop an organizational and business structure that allows [the Savannah River National Laboratory] to be able to transition into a separate contract anytime within the contract base period as directed by DOE.”
The Environmental Management office, which oversees the Savannah River Site, said it anticipates the new cost-plus-award-fee contract will include a five-year base period worth about $7 billion; a three-year option worth about $4.5 billion; and a two-year option worth about $2.5 billion. There is also a separate line item for construction of new NNSA tritium facilities, valued at about $520 million, in the site’s H-Area.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said earlier this year she was considering moving the semiautonomous DOE subagency’s tritium mission out of Savannah River, possibly to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Tritium gas increases the yield of thermonuclear weapons. The NNSA chief said the agency had to consider such a move following a federal court ruling stopping it from turning the site’s unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, a planned plutonium-disposal plant, into a factory for nuclear weapon cores called plutonium pits.
Fluor would not comment on the draft solicitation, nor would Huntington Ingalls or Honeywell, the other major partners on Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
A spokesperson for another major DOE contractor, BWX Technologies, likewise declined comment.
A spokesperson for AECOM, a Savannah River Site industry fixture on the liquid-waste cleanup side of the business, did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week.
A spokesperson for longtime DOE contractor Bechtel National sounded an optimistic, if noncommittal, note. The company partners with AECOM, BWXT, and CH2M in the current liquid waste contractor at Savannah River.
“Although we generally do not comment on work we are seeking, we do evaluate many opportunities over the course of the year,” the spokesperson said by email. “Bechtel has had a presence at the Savannah River Site and the Aiken region for 40 years. It’s important work in a great area and we hope our relationship continues for years to come.”
NNSA Site Take Over ‘Logical,’ Someday…
A day after the Department of Energy dropped the draft solicitation for the next Savannah River management contract, Michael Budney, the site’s top DOE official, said it would make sense for the NNSA to one day become landlord of the site.
While the draft solicitation released this week envisions the Environmental Management office remaining the site’s landlord for perhaps the next decade, it would be “logical” for the weapons agency to take the site “at some point,” Budney said Wednesday in a breakfast presentation to the local Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness group.
A DOE spokesperson in South Carolina later said Budney’s remarks — first reported by the local Aiken Standard — did not imply a timeline for an NNSA takeover.
Gordon-Hagerty floated the idea of an NNSA takeover at Savannah River in June, in the same internal memo in which she suggested the agency might yank its tritium mission off-site. The NNSA is studying both of those options, and others, as part of a far-ranging review of the agency’s mission in South Carolina. The Environmental Management office is participating in the review, which is slated to wrap up in mid-December.
In its most recent Savannah River Site Liquid Waste System Plan, published in 2016, DOE estimated it would take until the early 2040s to finish cleaning up liquid waste created at Savannah River by Cold War-era plutonium processing there. The Environmental Management office handles the cleanup under a contract separate from the site-management pact.
Editor’s note, 08/28/2018, 3:01 Eastern: the story was corrected to say that the Department of Energy expects to issue its final solicitation for this contract in January 2019.
