AECOM-led Savannah River Remediation (SRR) hired 378 new workers in 2018, and expects to bring on a similar number of employees this year under its liquid waste management contract at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
Energy Department cleanup sites such as Savannah River have been pushing hiring programs in recent years to offset an increasing number of retirements due to an aging workforce.
About 150 of the new hires helped Savannah River Remediation offset attrition and retirements in 2018, a company spokesperson said by email. Much of the remaining new workers will help the Saltstone Production Facility increase its operations from 10 hours a day, four days a week, to essentially operating around the clock.
Savannah River Remediation employs about 2,450 people. The average age of the new hires in 2018 was 37. When SRR acquired the 10-year, $5 billion liquid waste management contract in 2009, the average age of its workers was 54, compared to 48 now, SRR Administrative Services Director David Hollan said in a news release.
The contractor has seen “waves of employees reaching their retirement milestones,” Hollan said, adding SRR is trying “to balance this growing rate of attrition by bringing in the next generation workforce.” About a third of the new hires are military veterans, he added.
The company has hired eight people who previously worked for the now-terminated Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. About 1,000 people were to lose their jobs at the MOX Services project in January and February, and Fluor-led SRS manager Savannah River Nuclear Solutions expects to hire hundreds of them.
Savannah River Remediation is comprised of AECOM, Bechtel, CH2M, and BWX Technologies, and is currently operating under a DOE contract extension through March. The Energy Department originally awarded a new 10-year contract to a BWXT-led team in October 2017, but the deal was undone in February 2018 by a successful bid protest from an AECOM-CH2M partnership. The Energy Department last spring took best and final bids from the three bidding teams, including a Fluor-Westinghouse venture.
Once the successor contract is awarded, much of SRR’s workforce should transfer to the new vendor. Among other things the contract involves overseeing and eventually closing tanks that hold roughly 35 million gallons of high-level radioactive liquid waste that resulted from decades of making nuclear weapons materials. It also involves operation of the Salt Waste Processing Facility after its has been tested, commissioned and run for a year by Parsons.
As for a new long-term contract, Aiken Mayor Rick Osbon drew laughs Wednesday at the ExchangeMonitor’s Nuclear Deterrence Summit when asked to predict when a new contractor would be named. Osbon said he expects an announcement on Friday – just as he has for the past year.
