Huntington Ingalls Industries, Newport News, Va., and U.K.-based defense contractor Babcock International signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on civilian- and naval-nuclear decommissioning, the companies announced Monday.
“That’s everything from power plant design and construction on a global basis to component design and fabrication and construction, principally in North America and the U.K., to begin with,” Michael Lempke, president of the Nuclear and Environmental Group at Huntington Ingalls Industries, said in a telephone interview Tuesday with the Exchange Monitor.
In addition to that, “you can see the easy overlap in nuclear ship decommissioning…in U.K. submarines, right out of the gate as you start to look at where we are in the lifecycle for U.K. submarines,” Lempke said.
The companies announced their memorandum of understanding in a press release.
HII and Babcock also said they will explore how they can contribute to the trilateral AUKUS program, under which the U.S. and the U.K. will provide Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines armed with conventional weapons.
“AUKUS is probably the single-largest community of opportunities to come up in this space for quite some time,” Lempke said. “It is ripe for the collaborative application of United States and United Kingdom capabilities.”
HII, the former Northrop Grumman shipbuilding, announced its global ambitions with Babcock not long after the company upped its ownership stake in Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the Department of Energy’s prime contractor at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
HII took on a larger stake after Honeywell exited the Fluor-led partnership earlier in July. DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is planning to build a large factory to produce plutonium pits, fissile nuclear-weapon cores, at Savannah River sometime next decade. In step with that, the NNSA is taking over ownership of the site for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management later this decade.
“[W]e’re very happy to expand our role in Savannah River as the mission set there continues to expand with the shift over to NNSA,” Lempke said Monday.
Editor’s note, July 17, 2023, 4:23 p.m. Eastern time. The story was updated with comment from HII, and to show that HII maintains an interest in Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
