By George Lobsenz
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has rejected a protest filed by the losing bidder for a major nuclear cleanup contract at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site, saying the agency was justified in picking a higher-cost proposal by the winning bidder because it provided a better technical strategy for removing and processing millions of gallons of radioactive waste from underground storage tanks.
In a 30-page ruling, the congressional audit office said DoE provided well-reasoned explanations for its decision last December to award a six-year, $3.3 billion tank cleanup contract to Savannah River Remediation LLC (SRR)–even though it was some $560 million more than the proposal made by losing bidder, Savannah River Tank Closure LLC (STC), a consortium led by Parsons.
Among other findings, GAO said DoE substantiated its findings that SRR put forward a tank cleaning strategy that was “significantly superior to the protester’s less feasible approach” and which “demonstrated…superiority under nearly all of the [DoE’s] evaluation factors” for the competing bids.
Most notably, GAO said the superior technical plan proposed by SRR, a consortium led by URS Corp., would enable it to empty and close six more underground waste tanks than STC and process far more of Savannah River’s 36 million gallons of tank waste for disposal. In particular, GAO said SRR would operate Savannah River’s waste vitrification plant more efficiently, resulting in the production of 50 percent more waste canisters than would be produced by STC, with each canister containing a higher percentage of waste than those produced by STC.
The faster cleanup is important to DoE because it faces a mammoth task to dispose of the 36 million gallons of high-level nuclear waste left in Savannah River’s underground storage tank from decades of past nuclear weapons production at the South Carolina site. In addition, some of the aging tanks are vulnerable to leakage and the site has limited storage space in the tanks to accommodate waste streams from other cleanup activities at Savannah River.
Overall, DoE’s bid evaluation team concluded that SRR’s technical approach would result in “significant improvements to essentially all aspects of the [Savannah River tank waste cleanup program], significantly exceeding [DoE contract requirements] and STC’s proposal.”
In its protest, STC repeatedly charged that DoE “mis-evaluated” its cleanup approach, especially its plan to use a tethered robotic crawler device known as a “mini-mantis” to remove waste from the bottom of the underground tanks at the South Carolina nuclear weapons site. DoE said the mini-mantis units were poorly suited for cleaning out the tanks because they had a tendency to become tangled in the extensive piping inside some tanks–a conclusion that GAO said DoE was justified in reaching.
STC also argued that in evaluating the past performance of the companies in the competing consortia, DoE unfairly brushed aside negative information about URS’ key subsidiary, Washington Savannah River Co., which operated all of Savannah River for DoE from 1996 until 2008. In particular, STC cited allegations brought by federal officials against that Washington Savannah River Co. that it filed false claims with DoE during its tenure at Savannah River.
GAO said those allegations were resolved by URS and DoE–with URS agreeing to pay $2.4 million to the government to settle the case. GAO also said the DoE contracting officer in charge of the Washington Savannah River Co. decided the episode “would not be reported as adverse past performance”; GAO did not explain why that decision was made.
GAO also rejected STC’s contentions that DoE should have reconsidered its choice of SRR in light of a January 2009 report by the department’s inspector general that said internal auditors for Washington Savannah River Co. effectively covered up questions about the allowability of costs the contractor charged to the government.
GAO said the IG’s report came out five weeks after DoE’s decision to pick SRR and thus “the agency reasonably did not consider it.
“Although some preliminary findings [by the IG] were made available to DoE prior to the [IG] report’s issuance, DoE did not concur with those preliminary findings,” GAO added in its March 30 ruling on the STC protest.
Other members of SRR are Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Group Inc.; Bechtel National Inc.; CH2M Hill Constructors Inc.; and Areva Federal Services, LLC. SRR took over the waste tanks this month and its base contract runs through March 2015.
In addition to Parsons, the losing STC consortium includes Fluor Daniel and Newport News Nuclear, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman [NOC].