In the third and final piece of a major restructuring of contractors at its Hanford site, the Energy Department announced Wednesday it has selected a consortium led by Lockheed Martin [LMT], Jacobs Engineering and Wackenhut to furnish “mission support” services for cleanup operations at the eastern Washington nuclear site.
DoE awarded a traditional cost-reimbursement and award fee contract to Mission Support Alliance LLC under which the consortium will provide security, safety, environmental, site infrastructure, business management, data and computer systems management and other support services to three other contractors carrying out cleanup operations at the heavily contaminated Hanford site.
The contract will run for five years, with DoE having the option to extend it for another five if the consortium performs well. The department estimated the contract would cover some $3 billion in work over 10 years.
The consortium will essentially pick up support services now provided by Fluor Corp. under the Project Hanford Management Contract, which expires Sept. 30.
The deal represents the one of the largest DoE contract wins for Lockheed Martin in recent years; the company operates Sandia National Laboratories, but otherwise has seen its DoE portfolio shrink since the mid-1990s, when it operated several major DoE facilities.
The contract win is also important for Wackenhut because the security firm recently lost some site protection contracts at commercial nuclear reactors.
The mission support contract is the last of three big Hanford contracts awarded by DoE this year in an effort to accelerate and cut costs in its massive Hanford cleanup effort.
A team led by CH2M Hill and including Fluor was picked in June by DoE to get a contract for some $4.5 billion in cleanup work at Hanford’s so-called “central plateau.” That area includes five hulking nuclear reprocessing plants and numerous other highly radioactive facilities that separated and recovered plutonium and other materials for the nation’s nuclear weapons program from the 1950s to the 1990s.
That contract win was sweet for CH2M Hill because in May it lost a bigger contract at Hanford covering the operation and cleanup of dozens of underground storage tanks holding high-level nuclear waste. The company had held the tank contract for seven years, but lost a competition to retain it, with DoE announcing it was awarding the $7.1 billion tank operations contract to Washington River Protection Solutions, a consortium led by the Washington Division of URS Corp. and EnergySolutions.
Bechtel is leading another project at Hanford to build a waste treatment plant to convert the liquid tanks wastes into a glassified form for final underground disposal.