An estimated 100 jobs will be created when Lydig Construction of Spokane and George A. Grant Inc. of Richland start a $106 million project to complete a new 200,000-square-foot research facility that has been under way since last year at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The contract awarded Friday is the largest ever for Battelle since it began managing PNNL in 1965 and is too big for any one company, said Richard Richter, president of George A. Grant.

His company, which is also involved in projects for Fluor Hanford, Pasco High School and Lourdes Medical Center, will be looking for subcontractors, he said. The new jobs will pay family wages that mostly start at $22 an hour and up, he said.

Lydig/Grant will lay concrete floors, construct walls and roof and install mechanical and electrical systems in the new Physical Sciences Facility in the southern end of Hanford's 300 Area and finish the project, which began in August as a three-step process.

The earlier steps involved clearing and excavation of the north Richland site by Randolph Construction Services of Pasco and foundation work and placing of structural steel frames by Apollo Construction Inc. of Kennewick, Richter said.

The three-part contract helped get the project scheduled and started while Battelle worked on the bid and negotiation process for foundation and construction work, said Greg Koller, PNNL spokesman.

The new facility will help support national security and energy research missions and help replace office and laboratory space in the 300 Area that needs to be vacated by 2011 for environmental cleanup, Koller said.

The construction is part of the $224 million federally funded Capability Replacement Laboratory project that also will renovate the 325 Building in the northern part of 300 Area, he said.

The new facility will have three main buildings -- radiation detection, materials science and technology and "ultra-trace," which houses labs and instruments for verifying compliance with nuclear and chemical weapons treaties. It also has a high-bay area for research, a laboratory 40 feet below the surface and a radiation portal monitoring test track.

Lydig is the majority partner in the project, Richter said. "We're primarily providing supervision and quality assurance," he said.

The Richland-based general contracting company, which has completed projects worth $400 million since its inception in 1957, has extensive experience in construction of nuclear-related facilities, Richter said. "We're excited about the project."

Lydig/Grant will start the work in August and is expected to finish it in 2010, he said.

Later this year, PNNL expects to break ground on two privately funded buildings -- the Biological Science Facility and the Computational Sciences Facility -- near the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory in PNNL complex. Those facilities also are expected to be ready for business in 2010.