The National Nuclear Security Administration’s stinging evaluation of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility’s contractor has been publicly released, revealing an overall award fee percentage in the single digits.
The NNSA on Feb. 21 released to Savannah River Site Watch its fiscal 2016 performance evaluation report and award fee scorecard for CB&I AREVA MOX Services for design and construction of the MOX facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The site watchdog’s executive director, Tom Clements, had requested the evaluation via a Freedom of Information Act request last December.
In it, the NNSA gave the contractor an overall “satisfactory” rating and 8.9 percent of its award fee, or $267,000 of the total available $3 million for the fiscal year. It called the contractor’s cost, schedule, and technical performance “unsatisfactory”; for one of three evaluation criteria, integrated project execution, the contractor received zero percent of its award fee.
“The contractor was unable to balance project technical baseline requirements with other elements of project performance, such as cost and schedule,” the evaluation said. It also noted a “lack of transparency and openness in external communications with key project stakeholders by the contractor including continued release of misleading and inaccurate project information.”
The MOX facility is being built near Aiken, S.C., to eliminate 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium under a nonproliferation agreement with Russia, from which Russian President Vladimir Putin withdrew last October. The Barack Obama administration was pushing to terminate the project in favor of an alternative plutonium dilution and disposal method Putin said indicated the U.S. was not meeting its commitment under the deal. President Donald Trump’s administration is now responsible for determining the future of MOX.
The latest NNSA evaluation called “patently false” the contractor’s claim that the MOX facility is over 70 percent physically completed. It also said that despite arguing against NNSA’s cost estimates and completion percentage figures, the contractor did not offer a firm-fixed price proposal for its cost and schedule capabilities.