Oct. 12--The U.S. Department of Energy has started the long process of awarding new five-year contracts totaling roughly $600 million and 525 jobs to continue cleaning up the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.

Lead cleanup contractor Paducah Remediation Services and infrastructure contractor Swift & Staley currently do the work. Those contracts expire in late 2009 and mid-2010, respectively.

The new cleanup contract will involve about 450 jobs, and the infrastructure contract will cover about 75 jobs.

"We're very, very early in the process," said Reinhard Knerr, who leads environmental work for DOE at Paducah. "We have a baseline of work for cleanup and infrastructure planned through 2019, so we have reasonable estimates for the time and amount of money it takes."

Estimated at $80-$120 million a year, the new cleanup contract will cover a wide range of work including treating and/or containing buried materials; disposing of waste; tearing down old buildings; and cleaning up contaminated groundwater, surface soils, surface water and sediments.

Earlier this month, DOE hosted a presolicitation conference in Lexington for both contracts. Knerr said DOE expects to issue a draft request for proposals in late October or early November and invite potential cleanup bidders to tour the sprawling plant in November.

A request for proposals for the infrastructure contract is targeted for December. DOE expects the work to cost $12 million to $15 million annually, including maintenance of facilities and grounds, computing and telecommunication, property management, records management, and security. Both contracts will continue to be aimed at small businesses and have similar-sized work forces and types of jobs as now, DOE said.

DOE earlier named Paducah-based Swift & Staley as its Small Business of the Year for safe, cost-efficient work. The firm documented cost savings of about $350,000 in fiscal 2007 and $528,300 over the life of its $40 million contract.

Portage Environmental and its mentor, Shaw Environmental, formed PRS to bid for the existing $192 million cleanup contract. Workers have removed more than 30,000 tons of contaminated scrap metal, disposed of more than 1 million cubic feet of old waste and demolished about a dozen buildings.

Massive costs

The next big project is to remove the largest source of contaminated groundwater from the plant. Starting in November, workers will install electrodes in the ground to heat and vaporize thousands of gallons of the degreaser trichloroethylene, leaked from an equipment-cleaning building in the middle of the plant. Vacuum pumps will then extract the fumes for treatment. The system will start operating in late winter to early spring.

A 2007 DOE study determined that 101 residential parcels covering 271 acres and 64 parcels of farmland spanning 5,783 acres are or could be above about 10 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater flowing northeasterly from the plant to the Ohio River.

DOE modeled the potential spread of contamination over periods of 30 and 100 years and determined the groundwater cleanup cost alone ranged from $9.6 million to $151.4 million, depending on the extent of the work. In all cases the spread was projected to be only slightly outside an area -- bounded by Metropolis Lake Road, the Ohio River and Bethel Church Road -- in which DOE has capped wells and provided free municipal water at a cost of about $78,000 a year.

Earlier this year, DOE's budget request to Congress projected it would cost about $13.8 billion and take until 2040 to finally clean up the plant. The request delayed the final cleanup target by 10 years and nearly doubled the price tag from the $7.27 billion projected last year.

The change reflected more data on the cost of cleaning up and tearing down contaminated buildings, but Knerr said it didn't alter the schedule to complete major environmental work. Congress ultimately sets annual funding levels for the cleanup.

A 2003 agreement with Kentucky regulators requires cleanup of key groundwater sources by 2010, soils by 2015, streams by 2017 and burial grounds by 2019.

Joe Walker can be contacted at 575-8656.

-----

To see more of The Paducah Sun, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.paducahsun.com.

Copyright (c) 2008, The Paducah Sun, Ky.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.