Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
3/27/2015
The Fiscal Year 2014 fee determination for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant M&O contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, to be released “very soon,” will be reduced “significantly” due to the 2014 incidents at the plant, acting Department of Energy cleanup chief Mark Whitney said this week. Responding to questions about WIPP accountability at a House Armed Services Committee hearing, Whitney said that NWP’s fee determination is being finalized. “There have been a couple of actions that we’ve already taken with respect to the contract and the fee, called conditional payment of fee actions, which have reduced the amount of fee they can earn significantly,” he said. “I believe within the next several weeks the final fee determination will be made and made public.”
WIPP suffered a truck fire and radiological release in February 2014, and in response to the fire DOE cut the amount of fee NWP can earn in FY14 by 25 percent, or $2 million out of about $8.2 million in total fee available. EM has taken a second action since that has further reduced the amount of available fee, Whitney said. “The site has taken two actions to substantially reduce the amount of fee available to be earned,” he told WC Monitor following the hearing. “The next determination will be essentially working with fee that is a lower number than what we started with. I don’t want to get ahead of the actual fee determination by the official.” The DOE Office of Environmental Management did not respond to request for comment this week on the content of the second action. NWP declined to comment this week on the upcoming fee determination.
NWP is largely paid fee based on the amount of waste emplaced in the WIPP underground, and waste operations were halted less than halfway into FY14 after a salt truck fire and radiological release in February 2014. So far NWP has been paid only $21,576—the contractor can earn $659 per cubic meter of waste emplaced in excess of 1,050 cubic meters, and has emplaced 32.74 cubic meters above that threshold, according to a DOE FY’14 fee chart. Additionally, NWP can earn up to $1 million in fee by improving “the infrastructure and overall efficiency of the WIPP mission,” and up to $2.5 million for taking preventative maintenance actions.
