Babcock & Wilcox on Friday announced it will formally protest a recent decision that ends its management roll at the National Nuclear Security Administration's Y-12 and Pantex sites.
Earlier this month, NNSA awarded a consortium led by Bechtel National and Lockheed Martin the five-year contract worth as much as $709 million to operate those sites and potentially a tritium production facility at Savannah River. A B&W-led group has managed Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Pantex near Amarillo, Texas, for 12 years, and the company has asked the Government Accountability Office to review the decision. That will delay the new contract's implementation for upward of 100 days while the GAO makes a decision.
Y-12 and its security contractor, a G4S subsidiary, drew intense scrutiny last summer after protestors that included an elderly nun entered plant grounds and defaced a storage facility for highly enriched uranium. NNSA indicated the incident was a factor in the contract award, though not the determining one, the Engineering News-Record recently reported.