Warship builder Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) hopes its ownership of a nuclear cleanup business will offer an opportunity to break into for what is expected to be a growing market for decommissioning of commercial atomic energy plants
“Our group is very focused on determining the right way for us to focus in the commercial D&D market.” Michael Lempke, president of Huntington Ingalls’ Technical Solutions Nuclear and Environmental Group, said during an interview Tuesday in Washington, D.C.
A number of power companies have determined in recent years it is simply no longer economically feasible to keep their nuclear plants open in the face of challenges such as low natural gas prices. Some have secured financial aid from states to keep their reactors online, while others have retired their plants or announced their pending closure. The count of operational reactors could drop from 99 to 89 within seven years, according to a recent Forbes article, published before the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey shut down last month.
Each decommissioning project can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The market is evolving, as some companies look to temporarily or permanently offload responsibility for cleanup to companies that specialize in this work.
Chicago-based power company Exelon, for exampled, temporarily transferred the licenses for retired power plants in Illinois and Wisconsin to Utah-based nuclear services provider EnergySolutions for decommissioning. However, it plans to just sell Oyster Creek to New Jersey energy technology company Holtec, which also aims to buy two sites owned by New Orleans-based Entergy that are due to close in coming years.
“We have a purposeful approach into how we might enter that market,” Lempke said, without elaborating.
The company is not currently doing any commercial reactor decommissioning work, but is actively holding partnership meetings with “other world-class companies,” he added.
Huntington Ingalls Industries in January 2014 announced the acquisition of S.M. Stoller Corp., with its broad portfolio of nuclear and environmental consulting contracts. That enabled the owner to grow its footprint within the Energy Department. The parent company made Stoller part of its Newport News Shipbuilding division, a longtime designer and building of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
Huntington Ingalls and Stoller Newport News Nuclear now have roles in several major DOE nuclear sites. Affiliate Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) in April took over as legacy cleanup contractor at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, under a 10-year, agreement with a potential value of $1.39 billion. Huntington Ingalls is also a subcontractor to incoming Los Alamos management contractor Triad National Security and Stoller is a member of the M&O team for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
“If you think about what we do, day in and day out, we manage simultaneous complex nuclear projects,” Lempke said. The company is certainly capable of taking down a commercial nuclear plant to regulatory standards, he added.
Huntington Ingalls’ entry into the market “hinges on ensuring we have the right partners” and the right business model. “We continue to work through that,” Lempke said.
“We are comfortable on the nuclear island. … office buildings are not what we do,” Lempke said. without going into detail.
Lempke joined Huntington Ingalls in 2016, after serving as a vice president at Systems Planning and Analysis, a defense and space firm, for two years. From 2012 until 2014 he was associate principle deputy administrator at the Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). From 2009 until 2012 he was manager of DOE’s Naval Reactors Laboratory Field Office in Pittsburgh, according to his LinkedIn profile.
