The Energy Department could reissue the liquid waste management contract for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina within hours, according to the most recent schedule for major procurements at its Office of Environmental Management.
The DOE nuclear cleanup office posted the latest timeline on Nov. 19, and said the waste contract could be awarded by the end of November. It supersedes an Oct. 1 chart that envisioned the liquid waste award by the end of October. Rumors have flown since at least September that the announcement could be imminent.
No contract award had been announced as of press time Friday.
The agency typically does not comment on active procurements, and did not immediately respond to a question of the status of the contract Friday.
The Energy Department in October 2017 made its initial award for a 10-year contract potentially worth $4.7 billion to BWX Technologies-led Savannah River EcoManagement. But the deal came undone in February when the Government Accountability Office upheld a bid protest by an AECOM-CH2M team, saying DOE had not properly vetted the winner’s technical approach for liquid waste management.
The Energy Department last spring offered the three original bidders, including a Fluor-Westinghouse team, an opportunity to submit revised proposals.
Because the process has dragged on this long, one industry source said last week he thinks the cleanup office might restart the whole procurement from scratch rather than award the contract to any of the three bidders.
A second industry source reached this week said a case could be made for redoing the procurement. For starters, SRS liquid waste is a complex project at a complex site. The October 2017 award announcement was already months behind DOE’s earlier schedules and, as a result, many assumptions baked into the proposals are growing stale, he said.
For example, it was assumed the winning team would soon take over operation of the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) from Parsons, which would run it for a year after commissioning, the source noted. After Parsons had largely finished construction in mid-2016, DOE had figured the plant would start up by December 2018. Instead, the agency is now reviewing a new baseline proposal from Parsons for cost and schedule of plant completion and operation.
Such factors have to be complicating DOE’s evaluation, the second industry source said. In addition, whichever team wins the reissuance, the award is almost certain to be protested again, he said.
The winning vendor will be responsible for treatment, stabilization, and eventually disposing of over 30 million gallons of liquid waste from Cold War nuclear weapons work at Savannah River. The contractor also will also ultimately become operator of the Salt Waste Processing Facility at SRS.
For now, AECOM-led Savannah River Remediation has the job under a contract extension through March 2019. The total estimated cost for the 10-month extension is $432 million, DOE has indicated.
The updated procurement chart also reflects DOE’s decision to temporarily freeze procurement on the potential $15 billion operations and management contract for Savannah River. In October, the department said it was delaying procurement until after completion of the joint National Nuclear Security Administration/Office of Environmental Management study on the future scope of NNSA work at SRS.
In July, DOE extended the contract for Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) by a year through July 2019. The original 10-year deal, which expired this summer, was worth $9.5 billion and the extension is worth about $1 billion.
The updated DOE procurement schedule continues to anticipate a potential $100 million contract award by the end of this year for construction of the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee. The plant will treat mercury-contaminated water before it travels from the storm sewer at the Y-12 National Security Complex to East Fork Poplar Creek.
The updated chart includes new entries for three potential procurements for which DOE has issued requests for information (RFI)/sources sought notices in recent weeks. No timeline is yet listed, however, for draft requests for proposals for cleanup work at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Idaho Cleanup Project, and the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York.
