Huntington Ingalls Industries said Tuesday its operations for the Department of Energy would not be affected by the newly announced merging of two business groups.
The corporate parent of Newport News Shipbuilding is combining two business lines within its Technical Solutions division: The previous Fleet Support and Mission Driven Innovative Solutions (MDIS) groups are becoming the Defense and Federal Solutions group.
This new group will focus on tackling “tough national security challenges” for the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and other domestic and international customers, Huntington Ingalls said in a press release.
The other two groups within the Technical Solutions division are Unmanned Systems, a provider of remotely operated underwater vehicles and surface vessels; and the Nuclear and Environmental Services group, which supports DOE environmental remediation and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) operations. The release also said the Nuclear and Environmental Services group is poised to serve the expanding market for decommissioning of retired commercial power reactors.
Huntington Ingalls has been looking at entering the nuclear plant decommissioning field since at least 2018, but does not currently have any commercial contracts, a spokeswoman said Tuesday by email.
A Huntington-led joint venture, Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B), manages the 10-year, $1.38 billion legacy cleanup contract at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The shipbuilder is also one of the minority partners in the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, which operates DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina under a 12-year, $14.8 billion contract. Huntington Ingalls headed the team that in April lost a protest before the Government Accountability Office on a potential $4 billion contract awarded to a Leidos-led joint venture to provide landlord services at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
