A two-university team is offering its services to prospective bidders on a potentially 10-year contract to manage the National Nuclear Security Administration’s two major nuclear-weapons manufacturing sites, but it had not hooked on with any industry partners this week.
“The University of Tennessee System and the Texas A&M University System have announced a strategic alliance to explore the potential of joining of a team,” a spokesperson for the University of Tennessee System said this week.
As of deadline, “no other agreements have been made,” and the two institutions had not joined a bidding team, the spokesperson said.
The universities announced late last week that they were joining forces “for purposes of joining a team” to manage the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
This summer, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) decided not to pick up more options on Bechtel-led Consolidated Nuclear Security’s (CNS) prime contract to manage Y-12 and Pantex, meaning the agency now has a little more than a year to recompete the combined management contract and get a new site operator in place. CNS is off the job Oct. 1, 2021.
The planned follow-on contract will have five years of firm money and could be worth up to $28 million over 10 years, including options.
In their announcements, the two university systems touted University of Tennessee’s role managing the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and A&M’s spots on the prime contractors for the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
The two universities are the first entities to go public about their ambition to take over Y-12, the defense-uranium hub that makes makes nuclear-weapon secondary stages, and Pantex, which services, maintains and modernizes all active U.S. nuclear weapons.
“West Texas A&M University and the University of Tennessee Knoxville, have been significant workforce development resources for Pantex and Y-12, respectively, and their roles would expand under this alliance,” the University of Tennessee system wrote in a press release.
Meanwhile, one industry source has said that BWX Technologies, the former manager of Y-12 and Pantex before NNSA combined management of the facilities and handed the keys to CNS, was exploring a partnership with Huntington Ingalls Industries for the follow-on contract .
What is known for sure is that CNS will remain on site at Y-12 to finish construction of the Uranium Processing Facility, which Bechtel started building under a subcontract to the prime in 2018. The three-building facility will become the NNSA’s production hub for nuke secondary stages, replacing the aging Building 9212. The agency has said it will finish building the new facility by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion.
