The Department of Energy is asking small businesses for bids to dismantle Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility.

The final request for proposals was issued Thursday.

DOE hopes to award the FFTF cleanup contract to a "small business" between June and October 2004. Bidders are supposed to have their proposals submitted to DOE by Feb. 17, 2004.

DOE is on a nationwide push to award more significant contracts to "small businesses," defined as companies with 500 or fewer employees. The FFTF project would be the biggest of those contracts, reaching up to possibly $500 million, said Jay Augustenborg , a DOE official on the contract selection board.

The FFTF project is expected to be bigger than a single small business can handle, and DOE expects bidders to join in teams or for small companies to have bigger corporations as subcontractors. Under this concept, small businesses are supposed to do at least 51 percent of the work.

DOE put an upper limit of $500 million for the contract, which is supposed to run from 2004 to 2012.

But DOE also says it wants to fund the project at $46.1 million a year. Such an annual budget would put the project's total cost at $368.8 million.

Fluor Hanford, the contractor currently in charge of the FFTF, calculated in July that an annual $46.1 million shutdown budget would cost $706 million overall and stretch the work out until 2019.

Augustenborg said DOE had an independent firm study the proposed shutdown, and concluded that the job could be done for less than $500 million. "We anticipate (bids) coming in significantly less."

He also said that Fluor reviewed its own calculations, and concluded that the cost figures could be trimmed.

The FFTF has been dormant since 1992 as DOE and local FFTF backers unsuccessfully searched for enough missions to justify restarting it.

Both former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, a Democrat, and current Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, a Republican, decided to permanently close and dismantle the research reactor.

Last April, Fluor began draining super-heated liquid sodium from the reactor's secondary cooling system.

The new contracting team will have to carry on Fluor's current work.

Those tasks include removing liquid sodium from the primary cooling system, removing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated pipes and equipment, and processing radioactive materials and transporting them elsewhere.

DOE has not yet decided what the final state of the decommissioned reactor will be.

In October, DOE counted 46 small businesses that expressed an interest in the FFTF project.

After discussing the project with those companies, DOE took some steps to make it easier for a small business to bid.

"We're trying to be very cooperative and small-business-friendly in this," Augustenborg said.

After reviewing and discussing a draft request for proposals, DOE included in its final request for proposals:

-- Revised requirements that vested FFTF employees being transferred to the new contractor will keep their benefits at the previous levels for at least five years.

-- Language enabling the new contractor to get its bills paid quicker, an important consideration since cash flow is more tricky for smaller companies than for bigger ones.