It was not quite a year ago when Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) reorganized its Technical Services segment to include three distinct business units.
Nuclear and Environmental Services, the unit in charge business development at Department of Energy nuclear-weapons sites, got an unambiguously DOE-styled spear tip in Michael Lempke, a former procurement honcho from the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) who jumped to industry a few years after Northrop Grumman spun off HII into one of the more overtly nuclear companies listed on U.S. exchanges.
Lempke arrived at HII about five years after the spinoff and helped build on a DOE-nuclear portfolio that already included a junior partnership on the management and operations contractor for the Savannah River Site.
To that contract with DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), the agency’s legacy nuclear-cleanup steward, Huntington Ingalls Industries in 2017 added the Los Alamos Legacy Cleanup Contract. The company is the senior partner on lab cleanup manager Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos, LLC.
Also in 2017, HII became a junior partner on Mission Support and Test Services, the NNSA’s management and operations contractor for the Nevada National Security Site. A year later, the company clinched a spot as an integrated subcontractor for Triad National Security, NNSA’s management and operations contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Lempke says the wins, and HII’s future competitive viability at EM and NNSA, stem in part from the company’s ability to indoctrinate workers into the “unique” nuclear engineering culture of HII’s shipbuilding business before shipping them out to the DOE complex.
Lempke spoke recently, by video conference, with Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
NS&DM: Where’s home these days for HII Nuclear Environmental?
Lempke: About a year-and-a-half ago, almost two years ago now, we actually relocated from the [Washington], D.C. area down closer to our corporate headquarters here in Newport News, Va. So our office for the Nuclear Environmental group is in the city center of Newport News, Va.
You spent some time at Naval Reactors and later at National Nuclear Security Administration headquarters before you moved to industry, is that right?
It is. I was able to serve for the Navy’s nuclear propulsion program for about 17 years, both in the field and at headquarters. And then [I] went to the NNSA to stand up the infrastructure and operations group as the NA-3 and NA-00. And after about three years there, [I] went ahead and moved out into industry. But great experience with the NNSA, and just phenomenal people that work and serve there.
And while you were at the NNSA, you were the source selection official on the first combined management and operations contract for the Y-12 National Security Complex and the Pantex Plant.
I have no comment on that.
Recently, HII was rumored to be part of a team, with BWX Technologies and Honeywell, bidding on the NNSA’s next combined M&O contract for Y-12 and Pantex. Are you feeling confident about that bid?
We would not be interested in commenting on current or active procurements.
Generally, then, how should people assume HII is going to behave when it comes to competition for DOE nuclear business? Are you going to be in on every single competition?
I think you should assume that we are fully committed to the future scope for the Department of Energy across all of their major sites. I will tell you, though, that I think it’s really important to differentiate.
And you should not assume we’re going to bid on everything.
When we look at building teams, we build them to execute the work, not simply to win. And you do that by ensuring you have world-class partners with similar values that allow you to execute in accordance with your values.
We want to bid where we have the ability to make discernable progress and actually a strong commitment to drive the mission forward for the department. If we don’t see an opportunity for us to do that, we’re not going to compete in that. We’re not chasing the money. We’re working on a critically important mission and I think that is an important thing to keep in mind there.
You’ve bragged about HII’s ability to give people some nuclear experience on the shipbuilding side of the business before sending them out to DOE sites. You’ve said this is a way to seed the weapons complex and nuclear security enterprise with the next generation of leaders — but ships and DOE are two different worlds. How much does it really help a DOE site to send them someone who has a bit of experience with nuclear shipbuilding?
So we are actually working not just to provide those folks with the technical, hands-on skills to do their job, but we are actually driving HII’s nuclear, disciplined operational culture into them. So they arrive actually not just more skilled from a technical, hands-on perspective, but leaps and bounds ahead of folks from a cultural perspective to adhere to culture, drive standards and to help our joint ventures perform for the department at a level of expertise and distinction that a brand new person wouldn’t [have].
You can bring a college graduate from any good engineering program and they can become an individual contributor in the engineering department, but what they don’t bring is two to three years of solid nuclear culture indoctrination [and] understanding the need to focus on the attention to detail on the rigor and discipline of verbatim compliance with approved technical procedures, with defense in depth, what it means to truly be constructively dissatisfied with the status quo.
Well, other companies could also say that they’re giving people hands-on nuclear experience before sending them to DOE.
I think what we’ve done that is different is that I have 100 people working today in the world’s largest military ship-building organization, delivering nuclear powered ships in support of the nation’s defense, learning that culture specifically to [become] our bench [for] the Department of Energy’s national security mission.
I’m not telling you who can or cannot say it, I’m just telling you what we are doing and I believe it is a differentiator, I believe it’s a big distinction between how we look at the business for the long haul and how others may look at it in a more short-term focus.
So how, and where, have you deployed this deep bench to help DOE?
We have a tendency to insert HII personnel at multiple levels of the organizations that we are proud to be part of. We have probably more than 60 people today that are embedded at the joint ventures we’re working at that are HII employees. [They’re] taking direction from that joint venture, but [they’re] HII employees delivering that HII culture, that HII rigor and discipline and that HII focus on the performance for the mission in a way that, I think, is unique.
One of the challenges you see in the model we have in the DOE is that if you’re looking for cultural change — and you’ve seen that in some of the department’s requests for proposals recently — you’re not going to drive cultural change in a 6,000-employee organization by bringing in two or 10 new leaders, right? You drive cultural change at multiple levels of the organization.
The plutonium pit program at Los Alamos’ Technical Area 55, where HII is heavily involved, was slowed down during the COVID-19 response last year. How well has it bounced back, as far as you’ve seen?
At Los Alamos, there were broad portions of the laboratory that went to max telework and there were large portions of the laboratory that continued to come to work every day on NNSA mission-essential projects. I would say that while there were a lot of folks that were max-teleworking in the plutonium facilities within TA-55, there were an awful lot of people that went to work every day to continue to execute the important mission that happens there, to include pit production.
So you, personally, are satisfied with the pace of your team’s work on pits at both Los Alamos and Savannah River?
Yeah, I think both sites are performing very, very well. And especially when you mix in the challenges that have happened over the last year, I’m very proud of both those teams. I think they’re doing a great job in support of the mission.
How’s the relationship developing between Los Alamos, the science site with some pit-production expertise, and Savannah River Site, the production site without much pit expertise?
Our lead HII individual at Los Alamos [David Eyler] at the associate lab director level, used to be the chief operating officer of Savannah River. [With] regular communications [between] our senior folks at Savannah River and our senior folks at Los Alamos, in addition to what the two sites are doing at the very top level on collaboration supported by the DOE, HII is trying to ensure that we actively share lessons learned between the two sites on a regular basis.
We actually have centers of excellence that we support as a company. As an example, engineering centers of excellence. So the senior engineers that we have at each of the sites that we participate at, they regularly get together and share lessons learned. The shipyards’ chief engineers are invited and often participate in that, so as a company, we really focus on collaboration and sharing of lessons learned to ensure, to the maximum extent possible, that we only learn a lesson one time, right?
So between those two sites we have, I think, really good communications, sponsored in many ways by the folks in the department. And then, of course, our folks doing their additional part as well. So I’m really happy with that.
