The next technical services contract at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office in Lexington, Ky., is a five-year deal, including options, that has been set aside for eligible small-businesses, according to the draft solicitation the agency released recently.
The contract is a follow-on to the roughly $50-million Portsmouth Environmental Technical Services contract held by Restoration Services, which last year was acquired by the Alaska-based Arctic Slope Regional Corp.: a Native American-owned company. Work under the deal began in 2012 and would continue through September 2018, if DOE picks up the contract’s last one-year option.
The new contract, with its three-year base and two-year option, covers administrative support, technical engineering services, and oversight of prime contractors handling uranium enrichment cleanup at former DOE gaseous diffusion plants in Ohio and Kentucky, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management wrote in a press release last week. Bidders must have no more than 750 employees.
DOE invited industry to comment on the draft proposal by April 21, according to the cover letter for the draft request for proposals posted online.
The new technical contract would be a time-and-materials deal with a firm-fixed-price line item for the contract’s 60-day transition period, after which DOE would place firm-fixed-price task orders with the contractor on an indefinite-quantity, indefinite-delivery basis. The exact terms could change when DOE releases its final solicitation; the agency did not say when it planned to do that.
Assuming DOE picks up the last option on Restoration Services’ contract, the new contractor would begin taking over technical support work on Aug. 1, 2018, according to the draft solicitation. The bulk of the work would happen at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, Ky. Some of the work would also take place at the Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office in Lexington.
The plants enriched uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War arms race and later for commercial nuclear power plants.
