By George Lobsenz
Savannah River Tank Closure, a consortium headed by Parsons, has protested a December decision by the Energy Department to award a team led by URS Corp. a major contract to begin cleaning up and closing in place the 49 underground radioactive waste storage tanks at DoE’s Savannah River Site.
Three separate protests were filed by Savannah River Tank Closure at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in December and January, according to GAO records.
Neither GAO nor officials at Savannah River Tank Closure provided any details on the arguments raised by the losing bidder for the six-year contract, which covers $3.3 billion in work to begin removing the 34 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste in the underground tanks at the South Carolina nuclear weapons site.
In addition to Parsons, the losing consortium includes Fluor Daniel and Newport News Nuclear, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman [NOC].
DoE awarded the tank cleanup contract to Savannah River Remediation LLC, which consists of URS’ Washington Division; Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Group Inc.; Bechtel National Inc.; CH2M Hill Constructors Inc.; and Areva Federal Services, LLC. Savannah River Remediation will take over the waste tanks in April and its base contract will run through March 2015.
However, the contract award essentially keeps Savannah River’s tanks under the management of the current tank contractor at the site, Washington Savannah River Co. (WSRC), because most of the companies in Savannah River Remediation are part of WSRC, which is led by URS.
One of the protests by Savannah River Tank Closure came on the heels of a Jan. 14 DoE inspector general report that raised major questions about financial management practices by WSRC during its recent tenure as operator of Savannah River. Inspector General Gregory Friedman said internal auditors at WSRC effectively covered up questions about the allowability of costs the contractor charged to the government.
The inspector general’s report followed an agreement announced by the Justice Department last fall in which WSRC agreed to pay the government $2.4 million to settle allegations that the company sought to defraud DoE by failing to disclose during 2003 contract negotiations with the department that pension costs for workers at Savannah River would be sharply higher than DoE expected.