As of Friday, with only weeks to go before it hoped to transition the sites to new management, the National Nuclear Security Administration had yet to hold discussions with bidders for the next contract to manage the Pantex Plant and the Y-12 National Security Complex, sources said.
The new contract has a four-month transition period and the agency at deadline had not extended the Bechtel-led incumbent, Consolidated Nuclear Security, beyond Sept. 30.
Without an extension, the timeline starts to look challenging for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA): host discussions with qualified bidders, give the bidders time to modify their proposal based on those discussions, then accept and judge each bidder’s best and final offer, all before the calendar flips to June.
At stake is a potentially 10-year deal, with five years of firm money, to manage the NNSA’s main nuclear weapons production sites. With options, the total value of the pact is around $30 billion. The incumbent will remain on site after the transition to finish building the Uranium Processing Facility.
Bechtel National, Reston, Va., BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va., and Fluor Corp., Irving, Texas, all planned to lead a bid on the NNSA’s production site contract, sources told the Monitor late last year.
State and federal disclosures filed since then show that Fluor owns a 60% stake in a subsidiary called Nuclear Production One, which was incorporated in Delaware on Nov. 6: three days before the NNSA released its final request for proposals for the new combined contract to manage Pantex and Y-12.
In October, Bob Raines, the NNSA’s associate administrator for acquisition and project management, said he expected “that the team that is working on this [procurement] will do an excellent job and we will have an effective transfer on schedule.”
Not long after Raines’ prediction, Joe Biden was elected President, complicating the NNSA’s procurement calculations with a leadership transition that at deadline had yet to get underway.
One source said it might take until June for the Senate to hold hearings on Biden’s nominees to lead the NNSA. In late April, Biden picked Jill Hruby, the former director of the Sandia National Laboratories, to be administrator of the NNSA. Around the same time, Biden selected Frank Rose, who served in the Barack Obama administration’s Department of State, to be Hruby’s deputy.
“NNSA is currently evaluating offers received in accordance with the Request for Proposals (RFP) and the Federal Acquisition Regulation,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in a Friday email to the Monitor. “The transition period for the follow-on contract will commence once an award is made and the timeframe for protests has passed. In the event that NNSA extends CNS’ contract, CNS, along with the offerors that submitted proposals for the follow-on contract will be notified.”
