Bechtel National and SAIC have won a $3.1 billion, 5-year contract to manage and operate most of the US Department of Energy’s civilian radioactive waste management programme.
The contract, which begins 12 February, 2001, also has options for five additional years, which could boost its total value to $8 billion. The Bechtel-SAIC team will replace the DoE’s current contractor, TRW Environmental Safety Systems.
Under the new contract, the Bechtel-SAIC team will support DoE’s efforts to design, construct and operate a permanent geological repository to safely store spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste, the centrepiece of the DoE waste management programme. The DoE has been studying the site at Yucca Mountain, nearly 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, for location of the repository. The DoE is expected to send a site recommendation report to the White House shortly.
The Bechtel-SAIC team beat out two other teams competing for the contract. One team was headed by MK Nevada, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Washington Group, which would have employed Westinghouse Electric, Raytheon, Framatome Cogema and TeraTech as subcontractors. The other competing team was led by TRW Parsons Management & Operations, and included subcontractors Parallax and Dominion Energy.
