Huntington Ingalls Industries said this week it has hired two former National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) field office managers to lead a performance assessment team for company affiliates at Department of Energy nuclear sites.
Kim Lebak, who managed the NNSA’s Los Alamos Field Office from 2014 through 2017, and Doug Dearolph, who ran the NNSA field office for the Savannah River Site from 2009 through 2017, will direct subject matter experts tasked with analyzing issues and improving Huntington Ingalls work practices.
The former NNSA officials, hired in recent months, will report to Dave Long, Huntington Ingalls vice president of operational excellence. Both will work remotely, near their former sites. The three will form the heart of a team for operational excellence, Michael Lempke, president of the the Newport News, Va., company’s Technical Solutions Nuclear and Environmental Group, said in a Tuesday interview in Washington with Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Huntington Ingalls is one of the main industry subcontractors on Triad National Security: the nonprofit consortium slated to take over management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory on Nov. 1. The company is also part of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, which will manage most NNSA activities at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., through July 2019. It also partners in the Mission Support and Test Services operations team for the NNSA’s Nevada National Security Site.
Under Triad, Los Alamos will begin producing war-usable plutonium pits, and continue non-nuclear-explosive research applicable to maintaining the explosive power of existing U.S. nuclear weapons. The Savannah River Site houses NNSA’s tritium processing facilities, which prepare tritium created in commercial reactors for insertion into existing warheads and bombs.
The new Huntington Ingalls assessment team would not reproduce DOE audits, Lempke said. Instead, it would come in at the request of company leadership at a facility to take a fresh look at challenges. The goal is to identify and resolve potential problems before they worsen. Huntington Ingalls would also consider loaning the team to its DOE partner companies or helping those companies establish their own assessment programs.
“We are in the ‘stuff happens’ business,” Lempke said. “Things will eventually go bump in the night.”
