Chemicals maker DuPont and construction contractor Fluor have forged an alliance to seek the management contract for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site.

If successful, DuPont would be returning to the site it built in 1950 and managed for 39 years. Fluor, meanwhile, would be building on its experience managing nuclear cleanup in Ohio and Washington.

The site manager would oversee a contract worth about $7.5 billion over five years.

About 11,000 people work at Savannah River Site, protecting or cleaning up decades of waste from highly radioactive nuclear materials used for the military’s nuclear weapons arsenal during the Cold War.

DuPont has expertise in science but has been out of the nuclear business for 16 years. Fluor, primarily a construction company, has been managing nuclear cleanup for nine years at the Energy Department’s Hanford site in eastern Washington and more than 10 years at its Fernald site in Ohio.

The Fernald cleanup is expected to be completed next year. “We would love to redeploy some of our expertise at the Savannah River site,” said Lisa Boyette, a spokeswoman at Fluor’s headquarters in Irvine, Calif.

The DuPont-Fluor team would face competition at least from the current site manager, the Washington Group, which has indicated an interest in continuing after its existing contract expires by the end of 2006.

“We feel very confident in our ability to win this,” said Jack Herrmann, a Washington Group spokesman in Aiken.

Fluor has nearly 2,000 employees in Greenville, including 300 with its government contracts group. Fluor worked closely with DuPont for decades.

DuPont, based in Wilmington, Del., began building the Savannah River complex at the request of President Harry Truman in 1950 and operated it at cost until 1989.

Westinghouse Electric Co. won the first for-profit management contract, and operated at the site until the company disbanded in the 1990s.

Washington Group, based in Boise, Idaho, became the site’s manager after it bought the former Westinghouse’s government contracts group in 1999. The contract has averaged about $1.7 billion a year for the past five years.