Savannah River Nuclear River Solutions (SRNS) in fiscal 2015 earned a $37.8 million fee on its Savannah River Site management and operations contract with the Energy Department, or 82 percent of what it could have earned, DOE announced late Tuesday.
The company — an industry team comprised of Fluor, Honeywell International, and Huntington Ingalls Industries subsidiary Newport News Nuclear — is DOE’s prime contractor on both cleanup and refining at the Savannah River Site under a management and operations contract awarded in 2008. Including options, the deal is potentially worth nearly $460 million through July 31, 2018.
The company’s total award fee is split between DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), which oversees cleanup of legacy weapons programs at Savannah River, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which produces there, among other things, the radioactive hydrogen isotope tritium for the Pentagon’s current nuclear arsenal.
SRNS raked in about $27.2 million from EM, 88 percent of its potential fee. From the National Nuclear Security Administration, the company got some $13.7 million, or 74 percent of the available fee from the agency for fiscal 2015.
SRNS received an overall rating of “very good,” indicating the company “exceeded many of the significant award fee criteria and met performance requirements of the contract,” DOE wrote in its award notice.
DOE lauded the company for starting the so-called Head End process at H-Canyon ahead of schedule. April 2015 was the first time in “several years” the Head End process — a cleanup method for liquid waste — was used at the site, SNRS said in a statement marking the milestone last spring.
However, SRNS lost out on some fees for a Sept. 3 mishap in which workers on the site’s HB Line placed 400 grams of plutonium in a container not marked for transport. The gaffe, traced to a procedural violation that posed no risk of nuclear criticality, forced SNRS to shut down all of its nonessential nuclear and non-nuclear operations at the site for about a month.
Meanwhile, Savannah River Remediation, the liquid waste cleanup contractor at SRS, got a roughly $29 million fee for the budget year, better than 95 percent of the total fee available.
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