ORR Closure Contract Baseline Development

RSI serves as a pre selected, integrated teaming subcontractor to BJC providing technical and regulatory support to the DOE Oak Ridge Operations Environmental Management Program. RSI led development of the overall life cycle baseline that defines the scope, schedule and budget to execute the $8 billion, 15 year project. Planning for a job of this magnitude, complexity, and uncertainty required a broad range of technical expertise, field construction experience, regulatory knowledge, and sophisticated planning and organizational skills to create a plan that starts with a top level strategy and integrates information down to the level of specific project estimates and execution schedules. As the first step, RSI developed an “End State Vision” to define and gain agreement from the customer and all related stakeholders on the final land use and anticipated conditions at completion of the project. Once that vision was established, a comprehensive assessment was performed to “projectize” the work into 220 projects. The baseline was developed in the early stages of the project to serve as a planning tool. RSI coordinated a series of meetings with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) where the parties met 4 hours/day for 4 months to review every aspect of the program and agree on the “assumptions” that would be used to build the life cycle baseline. In these meetings, consensus was reached on the assumed remediation technique for each project. Agreement was reached on the assumptions regarding capping versus excavation of the various burial grounds, quantities of soil to be excavated from known source areas, which buildings were to be demolished, and remediation technologies to be applied to groundwater plumes. This innovative approach resulted in accelerated cleanup at a reduced project cost.