North Wind Services of Idaho Falls will start building the Accelerated Retrieval Project (ARP) IX enclosure at the Energy Department’s Idaho Site under a one-year, $1.7 million letter contract DOE announced in a Tuesday press release.
ARP is a program to build enclosures over buried waste at Pit 10 East in the subsurface disposal area of the radioactive waste management complex at the Idaho National Laboratory. The pit, roughly 0.7 acre in area, contains buried transuranic waste DOE plans to exhume by the early 2020s. ARP exhumation began earlier this decade. The entire project covers just over 5.5 acres at the site.
It was not immediately clear why North Wind would perform the work under an undefinitized letter contract, a procurement vehicle the federal government sometimes uses to speed awards for work deemed urgent. A North Wind spokesperson on Wednesday deferred to DOE for comment; a DOE spokesperson could immediately be reached for comment.
