Bechtel Nevada, Post Office Box 98521, Las Vegas, NV 89193-8521

B -- COTTER CONCENTRATE TREATABILITY TESTING SOL N/A DUE 040596. Contact Mike Brubaker, 702/295-7606. Bechtel Nevada (BN) the Management & Operating Contractor for the Department of Energy at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) has a requirement to treat a mixed (hazardous and radioactive) waste known as Cotter Concentrate. The current volume of waste at this time stored at the NTS is 1,236 55-gallon drums. The waste is spent uranium ore which contains various isotopes of uranium and thorium plus their progeny (radioactive component) as well as selenium at levels above the regulatory threshold established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requiring regulation as hazardous waste (toxicity characteristics). In addition, the pH of the material varies from 10 to 13 and has been characterized as exhibiting the hazardous waste characteristic of corrosivity as defined by the EPA. DOE and BN intend to perform cement stabilization on this waste in order to meet land disposal restriction requirements imposed by EPA for hazardous waste (Selenium) and also to meet the requirements of NVO-325, the NTS Defense Waste Acceptance Criteria, Certification, and Transfer Requirements. BN plans to complete the required work in three phases: Phase 1 - Compile a list of companies capable of performing the above work, this is done through this CBD announcement. Phase 2 - Select three companies from an evaluation of technical responses from the CBD to perform bench scale tests at the company's facility on 5 1-gallon size samples of the Cotter Concentrate. The number of companies is limited by the number and amount of sample material. Phase 3 - Selection of one of three companies who performed the bench test to treat the remainder of the waste. Criteria has been established to evaluate the companies, their methodology, and performance at all three phases. The successful company will be responsible for developing recipes of cement mass that will reduce the leachable level of the selenium to below 0.16 ppm. The concrete mass will be tested using the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure method. The treatability testing is required to be performed under Title 40, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 261.4, Paragraph (f). Also, the company must demonstrate that the quantity of radionuclides in the waste samples will not exceed their Nuclear Regulatory Commission License for radioactive materials on an activity per mass basis or in terms of total activity for all samples. The successful company must be able to mobilize their treatment equipment to the NTS to perform the treatment of the large quantity of waste. See Note 25. (085)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0023 19960401\B-0006.SOL)