Bechtel Hanford Inc. scored its ninth-straight "outstanding"rating, the Department of Energy announced Tuesday.

Bechtel tallied a score of 92.8 percent for the six-month period from March 1 to Sept. 30.

That means it earned $4.05 million out of a possible $4.37 million in graded performance fees - as well as a $1.87 million fixed-base fee for a total of $5.92 million.

"This consistent outstanding performance by (Bechtel) is a testament to the can-do attitude the contractor brought to the Hanford cleanup mission. I expect this type of performance to continue," said Linda Bauer, DOE's assistant manager for environmental restoration, in a press release.

Bechtel and two subcontractors - CH2M Hill Hanford and Thermo Hanford - are in charge of the site's environmental restoration work.

That includes demolishing outlying buildings and sealing up main chambers at Hanford's old reactors - a process dubbed "cocooning." It also includes removing contaminated soils, tackling ground water contamination and doing the final decontamination and demolition of old nuclear facilities.

Bechtel President Steve Liedle said, "We're real pleased with the progress. ... I'm personally proud of the work force without which we would not have been able to make these significant completions and starts." Bechtel earned good grades for:

Completing the clean-out of the N Reactor complex during the summer to the point where only a minimal amount of monitoring is needed.

Finishing the cocooning of C Reactor by the Sept. 30 deadline.

Safely moving at least 600,000 tons of contaminated soil from near the Columbia River to the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility, which is a huge central Hanford landfill.

Keeping Hanford's five pump-and-treat operations - which purify contaminated ground water -functioning at least 85 percent of the time. Leading Hanford's efforts to come up with a master plan to coordinate programs to analyze and fix problems with subterranean contamination leaking through the soil to the aquifer, then to the river. Bechtel received an $18,962 bonus for this work.

However, Bechtel also was penalized $27,125 for three industrial accidents and two lapses in radiological safeguards.

The accidents were two electrical mishaps and a piece of concrete falling during the C Reactor complex's demolition, Liedle said. No one was injured in any of the three accidents.

The radiological incidents were a wire rope cutting through a glove and into the hand of a worker in the contaminated N Basin area, plus an instance where a radiation warning sign was not posted, Liedle said.

This is the last time Bechtel will earn a combination of a graded-performance fee and fixed-base fee.

In July, when DOE extended Bechtel's contract by three years to 2002, it also switched Bechtel to a fee based 100 percent on performance. That 100 percent performance obligation will kick in at Bechtel's next six-month evaluation.

In Bechtel's previous six-month evaluation, it scored 88.8 percent. That translated to a performance fee of $2.89 million and a fixed-base fee of $1.58 million for the period from Oct. 1, 1997, to March 31, 1998.