Despite its unusual circumstances, the 10-year contract for legacy cleanup at the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico is off to a good start for Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B).
The contractor has about 500 employees at the lab, but fewer than 100 came over in April from prior environmental management prime Los Alamos Nuclear Security (LANS). The rest were either new hires or came from from N3B’s parent companies: BWX Technologies and Stoller Newport News Nuclear, which is itself owned by shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries.
“This was not a transition in the way that we and the department normally think about transitions,” Michael Lempke, president of Huntington Ingalls’ Technical Solutions Nuclear and Environmental Group, told Weapons Complex Monitor. “We really stood up a company from nothing in support of a really important mission for the department.”
With most DOE contract transitions, the workforce typically moves shifts from the old vendor to its replacement. But the cleanup contract for LANS – comprised of the University of California, Bechtel, AECOM, and BWXT – was basically “carved out” of its separate award for management of the nuclear weapons laboratory, Lempke said.
“You couldn’t use those business systems,” Lempke said during an interview Tuesday in Washington, D.C. “You had to create it out of whole cloth in 97 days.”
Most of the LANS workforce stayed with the operations contract, which on Nov. 1 will also officially shift to another contractor: Triad National Security, a venture of Battelle, the University of California, and Texas A&M University. Huntington Ingalls will also serve as an integrated subcontractor for the Triad team, supporting nuclear operations and manufacturing of plutonium.
“It was more of a startup of a new company than a transition of an ongoing operation,” Lempke said of the new cleanup contract, which has a potential value of $1.39 billion
The N3B operation has met its fiscal 2018 milestones under a consent order with New Mexico, enacted in 2005 and revised in 2016, that governs cleanup around Los Alamos, Lempke said. The company has also accomplished all its DOE performance-based incentive requirements for 2018.
The contract covers a number of waste management and remediation operations at Los Alamos, including surface and groundwater monitoring and finding a permanent solution for an underground chromium plume. BWXT leads the transuranic waste program, while the Huntington Ingalls unit is responsible for environmental remediation, Lempke said.
Aside from Los Alamos, Huntington Ingalls is a member of the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions management team through at least next July for DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Huntington Ingalls is anxious to do more work for DOE’s $7 billion-plus cleanup office. In addition to Los Alamos and SRS, the Newport News, Va., company is also a member of the Mission Support and Test Services operations team for the NNSA’s Nevada National Security Site, which also covers some environmental remediation.
“There is an opportunity for us to bring our operational experience to bear in support of high hazard and nuclear operations for EM,” Lempke said.
Lempke joined Huntington Ingalls in 2016 after having held leadership posts at the Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Former NNSA Managers to Provide Performance Assessments for HII
Huntington Ingalls has hired two former officials with NNSA experience to lead a performance assessment team for its affiliates at Los Alamos and other DOE sites.
Kim Lebak, who managed the NNSA’s Los Alamos Field Office from 2014 through 2017, and Doug Dearolph, who ran the field office for the Savannah River Site from 2009 through 2017, will direct the subject matter experts to analyze issues and improve Huntington Ingalls work practices.
The two, hired in recent months, will provide their expertise at DOE facilities where Huntington Ingalls affiliates are working as part of the contractor or subcontractor teams, Lempke said.
The two will report to Dave Long, Huntington Ingalls vice president of operational excellence. Both will work remotely, near their former DOE sites. Those three will form the heart of the team for operational excellence, Lempke said.
With their NNSA backgrounds, Lebak and Dearolph understand the DOE-contractor relationship and experience interacting with the NNSA and DOE’s cleanup office, Lempke said.
The assessment team would not reproduce DOE audits, but would typically come in at the request of company leadership at a facility, to take a fresh look at challenges, Lempke said. 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,” he added. “Things will eventually go bump in the night.”
The government trusts the contractor to operate and manage its mission, so the department should have the resources of the parent company at its disposal, especially when problems arise, Lempke said.
