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 Nuclear Security & Deterrence 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 the 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.
