Best known as a military shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls Industries has been part of the Department of Energy’s weapons complex since 2008 and hopes to expand its foothold in the sector, the president of the company’s nuclear and environmental services group said Thursday.
The parent of Newport News Nuclear also has an “aspirational” interest in breaking into the commercial nuclear plant decommissioning market, Michael Lempke said during an online discussion held as a sidebar to this week’s virtual Waste Management Symposia.
“Environmental security is also national security,” so the market for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) and the National Nuclear Security Administration, where Lempke worked as a senior manager until 2014, are logical sectors for the company to involved with, he told Weapons Complex Monitor and other participants in the interactive discussion.
“We absolutely plan to be an active player on the entire DOE,” Lempke said in response to a question from Weapons Complex Monitor. “Of course, no, I’m not going to tell you which ones we are going after.”
In addition to being a minority partner in the Savannah River Nuclear Solutions venture that operates the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Huntington Ingalls affiliates are part of the contractor teams at the NNSA’s Nevada National Security Site and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In addition, Newport News Nuclear-BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) holds the legacy cleanup contract at Los Alamos that, including options, could be worth some $1.4 billion over 10 years.
There is industry talk, however, DOE might end its relationship with N3B in 2023, when the contract’s five-year base period expires.
“I don’t have any intelligence on what the department of energy is going to do on any contract,” Lempke said, adding that he has confidence in N3B’s ability “to perform at a very high level.”
The Huntington Ingalls executive pointed to similar figures cited earlier at the Waste Management Symposia by N3B President Glenn Morgan that show the cleanup contractor has already sent 37 shipments of transuranic material to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. This includes “co-mingled” transuranic waste from operations run both by N3B and laboratory operator Triad National Security.
Co-mingling waste from the cleanup and defense missions saves valuable space in the DOE’s underground salt mine near Carlsbad, Lempke said.
COVID, Chromium, Roadside Contamination Complicate Los Alamos Work
Crews handling legacy cleanup at Los Alamos were relieved last summer to find an underground chromium plume remained static during three months of bare bones operations due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“One of our concerns was the possibility of plume rebound,” where it might drift closer to local drinking water supplies, Danny Katzman chief scientist of the N3B water program, told the Waste Management Symposia Wednesday.
At the direction of DOE, N3B’s cleanup operations at Los Alamos scaled back to essential operations on March 27, 2020 due to the pandemic, Katzman said.
N3B took about three days to move most of its 600-person staff to remote in late March of last year when DOE issued the partial suspension of operations for operations, said Joe LeGare, vice president and executive officer at the joint venture.
About a third of N3B’s office staff returned on-site when Los Alamos entered Phase 1 of DOE’s restart plan last year. But in September N3B resumed maximum telework after cases spiked in New Mexico, he said.
The chromium plume was discovered in 2005 about 1,000 feet below the surface. As an interim solution, N3B employs a combination of injection wells and extraction wells to control the size of the plume and keep it from reaching the Los Alamos County water supply, Katzman said.
The local canyons and rugged terrain make the drilling for the wells difficult and expensive, Katzman said.
Another high-profile remediation issue at Los Alamos is the February 2020 discovery of contamination unearthed alongside a public road on land that DOE had transferred to Los Alamos County a few years ago. The land, sometimes called the DP Road site, was supposed to have been fully remediated.
N3B will perform the field work at the DP Road site this year, Katzman said. The contractor is currently addressing comments that the New Mexico Environment Department made on the DOE remediation plan, he added.