When Westinghouse Government Services opened an office just outside Washington, D.C., this week, the resurgent nuclear-cleanup contractor threw itself a little housewarming party.
Many of the guests were members of what company President Cathy Hickey calls “the DOE contractors club:” a tight-knit group of sometimes-competitive, sometimes-cooperative outfits that includes heavyweights such as AECOM, Bechtel, BWX Technologies, CH2M, Fluor Corp., AREVA, Atkins, and others.
“Frenemies,” Hickey joked in an interview this week from her new office in Arlington, Va. “Or ‘competimates.”
Some of those frenemies, as they milled about the party this week, couldn’t resist the obvious dig: Westinghouse’s new 29th-floor office certainly didn’t look like the sort of place a bankrupt company would call home.
Westinghouse Government Services is legally a limited liability corporation that isn’t part of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization parent Westinghouse Electric entered in March. Not that this stops tongues from wagging.
Last year, some 18 years after it exited the game by selling the first incarnation of its government-services business to Morrison-Knudsen, Westinghouse started forging a path back into the DOE weapons complex.
Hickey joined Westinghouse around this time in 2016 from CH2M. She has also worked for DOE Club members Bechtel and URS (now AECOM). Shortly after she came on board, and months before the parent company’s bankruptcy filing, Westinghouse officially returned to the contractors club as part of an Atkins-led team that won a five-year contract to process depleted uranium hexafluoride, DUF6, at DOE facilities in Kentucky and Ohio.
Westinghouse is also part of a Fluor-led bid that is a finalist in a DOE competition for 10 years’ worth of liquid-waste cleanup work at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. That award is expected in December.
Looking to leverage its commercial expertise in liquid waste processing and the nuclear fuel cycle, Westinghouse Government Services is also eyeing impending opportunities at the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, along with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, Hickey told Weapons Complex Monitor.
What’s your personal background? And how did you get the opportunity to lead the Government Services reboot?
I have worked for contractors supporting the Department of Energy for over 30 years. I started on a project called FUSRAP: the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. If you cut my experience directly down the middle, I have about 50 percent in business development and about 50 percent in operations and project management.
I’ve worked on projects like Y-12 [at Oak Ridge], I started the infrastructure reduction program at Y-12. Right before I came here I was at CH2M doing two jobs: I was reachback on UCOR [the primary decontamination and decommissioning contractor at the Oak Ridge Reservation] and ran the re-industrialization program. I was also doing business development for CH2M.
One day, I got a call, and the next thing I know, I’m here. Why am I here? Because I love challenges! I live for it. Honestly and seriously, I was working in the industry before Westinghouse exited. If I can help bring Westinghouse back into the industry, and I very well plan to, it’ll be one of the proudest moments of my entire career.
Westinghouse Government Services is owned by Westinghouse Electric Co., which has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Your competitors are quick to point out the ugly optics of this association, but is it really an obstacle for winning DOE business, practically speaking?
Well, the optics are there. [But] Westinghouse Government Services LLC was not part of the filing. We are separate.
Do our competitors like to bring it up? Yes, of course. Is it impactful? No. Ours is business as usual. We’re in bids, and we’re in active discussions in joining bids.
None of Westinghouse Government Services’ contractors or contracts or suppliers were impacted [by the bankruptcy] at all. When we go after these [DOE] bids and you look at what’s required from running them, most of them have a requirement of a performance guarantee and they have a working capital investment that you have to come up with. That’s enough to cover 30 to 45 days, or in some cases, only two weeks’ worth of capital. So as long as you meet your financial requirements to manage these jobs, then there’s no impact.
How big is the core Government Services team at Westinghouse?
Our core staff has just been stood up, and the core staff I think is up to 15 now. But we reach back to however many we need [at the parent company]. We’ve got about 12,000 employees who do commercial operations worldwide [and] 4,000 of those 12,000 do commercial nuclear operations. That’s a huge component of our workforce that does nuke operations, which is what we’re really focusing on.
The interesting thing is, even though Westinghouse sold off its government projects years ago, what we’re finding is that many of our employees didn’t go with the acquisition. They’re still rooted in our current organization. So we have access to individuals in our current organization that have the knowledge of working on the sites of the past.
And when you look at the DOE club of contractors, when they entered the market, they entered on their commercial capabilities. If you look back at the majority of their entries, Bechtel took their commercial capabilities and packaged it in order to enter and offered the Department of Energy what they needed at that time. So did Fluor. AECOM actually ended up acquiring it [via URS]; that’s how they entered the market. So you have those that acquire and then you have those that grow based on their capabilities.
It’s our intent to grow on our capabilities. We’re taking all of our commercial capabilities and packaging it such to meet the needs of the Department of Energy.
Has that helped you score marks for good past performance as you bid on new work from DOE?
That’s one of the things that I’ve talked with Ralph Holland [director of DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center in Cincinnati, Ohio] about in detail. That is one of the challenges: taking our corporate capabilities and packaging those corporate capabilities such that it is reviewed at DOE as similar sized scope and complexity to the jobs that are going on in the agency. We successfully did that on DUF6 and [Savannah River Site] liquid, so we’re thinking that we’re figuring out that each one’s different.
Are you looking mostly to team, or to lead?
It really depends on the work. It’s one of those things where what the department has to have is a partner on their sites that can actually cover the entire scope. There are not many companies that can bring everything. There are some that can bring a blush on everything, but when you’re looking for winning work, we’ve found that teaming and making sure you’re bringing the best has often worked.
[For example,] we have a trademarked quality program that’s focused really on production-type facilities. But what we’re finding is that in a cleanup environment, it’s very, very important that quality is placed on equal standing with safety. When DOE stood up their ISMS, their Integrated Safety Management Systems, years ago, [it was] incredible: it got the workforce involved with what’s going on at the sites. [But] it was basically focused on safety. And then they have a separate quality program. We’re finding that our quality program is really needed in what’s going forward at DOE.
So it’s not a one-size-fits-all for any of these procurements. That’s why you see these teams forming, and we’re called frenemies, and competimates. But honestly, it’s kind of a clean slate for every single bid.