PHOENIX — The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is no longer producing a public roundup of solicitation timelines for cleanup jobs within the nuclear weapons complex, a procurement official said here Tuesday.
“We no longer have a procurement schedule on the website,” Norbert Doyle, EM deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and program management, said during a panel discussion at the annual Waste Management Symposia.
“We had a hard time keeping that up to date,” he added. The last schedule update was posted in May 2019.
In addition to listing when major requests for proposals would be issued, the procurement schedule identified three-month windows for contract awards. The published timelines often missed the mark. For example, the last version said the multibillion-dollar tank management contract for the Hanford Site in Washington state would be out by August 2019, but it hasn’t been issued yet.
Still, prospective DOE contractors at this week’s conference and an October 2019 industry event in Knoxville, Tenn., told Doyle they liked having access to the procurement schedules, preferring to have an imperfect chart rather than no chart.
Doyle said DOE procurement officials will share as much information as possible on RFP and award schedules in public events such as the Waste Management Symposia.
Toward that, he said the next contract for management of radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state is in final stages of review and should be issued “soon.” He declined to be more specific.
In addition, Doyle said a draft RFP could be issued within a few weeks for operation of the Savannah River National Laboratory. The Energy Department is looking to carve that work off from its current position within the management contract for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which is held by Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
Within a few months, DOE could also announce a solicitation for a landlord services contract for the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, similar to the site services RFP recently rolled out for the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
