The Department of Energy’s award of a $45 billion, 10-15-year contract for cleaning up the massive amount of noxious liquid radioactive and chemical wastes at the closed Hanford, Wash., nuclear weapons site, a residue of the World War II project to develop the atomic bomb, is back in court.
The Tri-City Herald reports, “The losing bidder for the contract, Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance, or HTDA, said in a new lawsuit filed in federal court that the Department of Energy unfairly changed the rules of its solicitation to award the contract to Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure, called ‘H2C,’ for a second time.”
The contract is obviously lucrative – and large enough to keep tag teams of lawyers employed for thousands of billable hours. It is the major effort to deal with the Hanford tank farm, where some 56 million gallons of nasty wastes are stored in tanks, some of which are leaking and many of which are potential leakers. The wastes threaten the Columbia River.
The cleanup project includes a vitrification plant to capture some of the least radioactive wastes in glass for permanent underground disposal, which has only recently begun operation after more than 20 years of fitful development.
Here are the current contestants:
Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure, H2C, holding the current DOE contract. H2C is a joint venture of made up of BWXT Technical Services, Amentum Environment and Energy, and Fluor Federal Service.
Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance, or HTDA, the challenger. HTDA was originally formed by Atkins Nuclear Secured, Jacobs Technology and Westinghouse Government Services. Complicating the cast of characters, in November Jacobs announced a partial merger with Amentum.
DOE a year ago awarded H2C the Hanford contract. HTDA, the only other bidder, challenged the award in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., claiming that H2C had failed to properly register with the U.S. System of Award Management. The Justice Department then weighed in, saying neither H2C nor HTDA had properly registered. Judge Marion Blank Horn threw up her hands in dismay and told DOE to run the competition again.
DOE complied and again awarded the job to H2C at the end of February. Predictably, HTDA again protested the bid in the federal court, charging that DOE had changed the award criteria to tilt the contest to H2C. In its revised request for proposals, DOE tinkered with the wording of the registration requirement by deleting a requirement that registration continue through the time of the award, according to HTDA. DOE failed to publish the change in the Federal Register and provide legal notice-and-comment provisions before going ahead with the bidding and award, said HTDA.
Th Richland newspaper reported, “HTDA accused DOE of ‘going to extraordinary lengths to avoid awarding the contract to a compliant competitor with a similarly evaluated proposal and a fair and reasonable price.’”
English novelist, 1812-1870
The Hanford site was chosen by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to make plutonium for the nation’s nascent nuclear arsenal, taking advantage of the copious Columbia cooling water. Production under the Atomic Energy Commission and its successors, including DOE, continued until 1987. For most of its production period, wastes piled up with little attempt to do more than isolate them in giant tanks. Denial, not disposal, was the defining response to the wastes.
Starting in 2009, Washington River Protection Solutions, a private company owned by Amentum and Atkins, with Orano as a subcontractor, ran the cleanup of the Hanford waste tanks.
DOE decided in April 2021 to seek a new cleanup contractor and issued a request for bids for the $45 billion contract in October 2021, including $17 billion for the vitrification plant. It would have been the first specific contract for the glassification effort.
Stay tuned. There is likely more to come…much more.
–Kennedy Maize
*In “Bleak House” (1853) by Charles Dickens, a central plot element is a generations’ long legal estate dispute with multiple wills and trusts that was in and out of court so many times that, by the end, legal costs had eaten the entire estate. It was known as Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Dickens wrote, “Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it.”