09/03/2008

By SHANNON DININNY  / Associated Press

The federal government has awarded a new contract to handle safety and security, information technology and road work at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.

The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that an alliance of companies known as Mission Support Alliance LLC, including Lockheed Martin Integrated Technology, Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., and Wackenhut Services Inc., would oversee those activities at south-central Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation.

The value of the five-year contract, which has the option of being extended for another five years, is estimated at $3 billion over 10 years.

"The final Central Plateau contract award to the Mission Support Alliance LLC positions the department to begin a new chapter as it continues the safe environmental cleanup of the Hanford site," U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman said in a statement Wednesday.

The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Today, it is the nation's most contaminated site, with cleanup expected to last decades.

The 586-square-mile site's central plateau once housed five chemical separation buildings and other facilities that separated and recovered plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.

The Energy Department awarded two other contracts earlier this year to clean up that area.

In May, CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation won the contract to characterize waste and contaminated buildings, dispose of waste and conduct environmental surveillance, and monitor and clean up contaminated groundwater, among other things. One month later, the department awarded the contract to empty underground tanks of radioactive and hazardous waste to Washington River Protection Solutions LLC.

The contracts represent three of five major cleanup contracts at Hanford.

In 2005, the Energy Department awarded Washington Closure LLC the contract to clean up the 210-square-mile Columbia River corridor, while Bechtel National Inc. is building the waste treatment plant that will someday encase the tank waste in glasslike logs for long-term storage underground.

Mission Support Alliance will begin to take over tasks on Oct. 1 and assumes full responsibility for the contract Jan. 1, 2009.