Lured by the prize of a megabuck contract, more than 150 individuals and 60 organizations registered to take part in online briefings last week on the planned remediation deal at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
The list of firms that turned out to kick the tires and learn more about the potentially 10-year, $8.3 billion contract reads like a who’s who of the DoE business.
These include Atkins, Amentum, Bechtel, BWX Technologies [BWXT], CDM Smith, EnergySolutions, Fluor [FLR], Huntington Ingalls [HII], Honeywell [HON], Jacobs [JCM], Leidos [LDOS], Longenecker & Associates, Los Alamos Technical Associates, Navarro Research and Engineering, North Wind Group, Orano, Parsons [PSN], Perma-Fix Environmental Services, RSI EnTech, Spectra Tech, Veolia, Waste Control Specialists, and Westinghouse [WX].
The virtual meetings were held Tuesday through Thursday last week on the draft request for proposals (RFP) issued last month. The DoE Office of Environmental Management published its slides on the draft RFP presentation online yesterday. There is also a site tour video online; the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic prevented in-person tours.
Comments on the draft RFP, which focuses on cleanup and waste management at the Y-12 National Security Complex and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, are due this Thursday.
The current contractor, the Amentum-Jacobs joint venture URS/CH2M Hill Oak Ridge (UCOR), has essentially finished tearing down and remediating old facilities at the East Tennessee Technology Park: the former gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment complex at Oak Ridge. UCOR has a $3.3 billion contract that began in August 2011. The contract was set to expire July 31, but the DoE agreed to an extension that could keep UCOR around for as many as two more years, through July 2022.
Oak Ridge was the first U.S. uranium enrichment site, and DoE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration still makes the secondary stages of nuclear weapons there, at Y-12. The U.S. no longer refines uranium domestically, relying instead on the stockpile amassed during the Cold War for nuclear warheads and bombs, and for fuel to power naval submarines and warships.