After an extended period of competition, the Energy Department last week announced it has picked a new operating contractor for the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project at its Idaho site, replacing Bechtel BWXT Idaho Inc. with a consortium led by CH2M Hill and Newport News Nuclear Inc.
The award of the five-year contract, which covers some $592 million in cleanup work, follows repeated extension of the Bechtel-BWXT contract since last September, with the department saying it needed more time to evaluate competing bids.
The selection of CH2M Hill Newport News Nuclear LLC comes despite DoE’s recognition of exemplary safety performance by Bechtel BWXT last year, when the department named the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) as a star site in its voluntary protection program.
The new contractor will take over operations that involve analyzing, processing and packaging for disposal of the 30,200 cubic meters of plutonium and other transuranic waste currently stored at the Idaho facility. The waste is being shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, an underground repository for transuranic waste.
The AMWTP was established to dispose of some 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste stored in Idaho by 2018, as required under a 1995 environmental compliance agreement that DoE signed with Idaho.
Most of the waste is mixed with toxic chemicals, and it was generated during past weapons production operations at the now-closed Rocky Flats plutonium plant in Colorado and other DoE facilities. The department announced in 2008 that it would bring more such waste from other DoE sites to Idaho so they would not have to replicate the specialized transuranic waste handling capabilities of the AMWTP.
DoE said CH2M Hill Newport News Nuclear would take over the site May 1 and that its new cost-plus-award fee contract runs through September 2015.