Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth got only about 28 percent of its available award fee for the six months ended March 28, according to the award fee determination scorecard published this week for the Energy Department’s prime contractor for decommissioning and decontamination of the former gaseous diffusion plant in Pike County, Ohio.
That was good for roughly $6.8 million of a possible fee of more than $24 million for the period, according to the scorecard.
Also, according to the scorecard, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth had some trouble with nondestructive assay characterization — examining and identifying equipment and materials without cutting them up to get a sample — at the X-326 uranium enrichment building.
Fluor’s trouble with characterization “has continued to delay work,” DOE wrote in the scorecard. “However, [the company] appears to have taken definite steps to address these issues,” the agency wrote, without saying what steps the company took.
Besides the characterization, the company “continued to experience difficulties in work control and planning, and overall project scheduling,” DOE wrote. Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, though, “has taken steps to revise the work control process and organization, and … has also increased efforts to manage and integrate the project schedule.”
A Fluor-BWXT spokesperson declined to comment Friday.
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s contract could be worth up to $3.1 billion over 10 years. When the deal was announced in 2010, it was valued at about $2.1 billion over a decade. In March, DOE restructured the company’s contract, splitting a single five-year option into a pair of two-and-a-half year options. DOE said at the time that while the company was doing a satisfactory job, there was room for improvement.
The first of Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s options is worth just under $870 million and keeps the company on the job through Sept. 30, 2018. The second option, which would extend the work through March 28, 2021, is worth just over $695 million. Combined, the options are potentially worth slightly more than $1.55 billion.
Meanwhile, Wastren-EnergX Mission Support got about $977,000 for the seven months ended April 24, which was the end of its 10-year mission support contract at Portsmouth. The company lost out on some of its possible $1 million fee in part because it did not “meet the site objectives in conducting the required security analysis as it relates to the rollup of Special Nuclear Material, supporting the D&D of X-326,” DOE wrote in the latest award fee scorecard.
DOE also dinged Wastren-EnergX because the company constantly marked documents as being for Official Use Only, even in cases when the document did not contain information sensitive enough to merit that classification.
The company “is very pleased by our final award fee scores from the PPPO for our work at Portsmouth under this contract that started in 2010,” Steve Moore, president and chief executive of Wastren-EnergX managing partner Wastren Advantage, wrote in a Friday email. “We certainly believe our performance helped us win the rebid earlier this year and this project has had award fee scores in the 90’s for the last 4 years.”
Wastren is the main subcontractor on the follow-up Portsmouth support contract now held by Portsmouth Mission Alliance. That deal, which phased in March 16, is worth up to $140 million over about five years, including a roughly two-year option.
