Huntington Ingalls Industries said Tuesday its operations for the Department of Energy would not be affected by the newly announced merging of two business groups.
The corporate parent of Newport News Shipbuilding is combining two business lines within its Technical Solutions division: The previous Fleet Support and Mission Driven Innovative Solutions (MDIS) groups are becoming the Defense and Federal Solutions group.
This new group will focus on tackling “tough national security challenges” for the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and other domestic and international customers, Huntington Ingalls said in a press release.
The other two groups within the Technical Solutions division are Unmanned Systems, a provider of remotely operated underwater vehicles and surface vessels; and the Nuclear and Environmental Services group, which supports DOE environmental remediation and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) operations. The release also said the Nuclear and Environmental Services group is poised to serve the expanding market for decommissioning of retired commercial power reactors.
Huntington Ingalls has been looking at entering the nuclear plant decommissioning field since at least 2018, but does not currently have any commercial contracts, a spokeswoman said Tuesday by email.
A Huntington-led joint venture, Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B), manages the 10-year, $1.38 billion legacy cleanup contract at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The shipbuilder is also one of the minority partners in the Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, which operates DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina under a 12-year, $14.8 billion contract. Huntington Ingalls headed the team that in April lost a protest before the Government Accountability Office on a potential $4 billion contract awarded to a Leidos-led joint venture to provide landlord services at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The Energy Department plans to extend a sole-source contract with Atkins for research on vitrification at the Waste Treatment Plant being built at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The DOE Office of River Protection at Hanford said in July 14 procurement notice it intends to keep using the SNC-Lavalin Group subsidiary for testing of prototypes of components, such as melters, that would be used to convert low-activity waste into a glass-like substance at the Bechtel-built facility.
The actual testing by Atkins occurs on the East Coast, at the Vitreous State Laboratory of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The Catholic University laboratory has a long-running partnership with Atkins.
The Energy Department has determined that Atkins Energy Federal, in its partnership with the Catholic University facility, has the expertise necessary to test a pilot-scale melter and ancillary equipment similar to what will be used at Hanford.
The contract, valued at $9 million over up to five years, will replace a 13-month, $1.5-million extension scheduled to expire Dec. 30 on a contract issued in 2016.
The WTP will convert much of the 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste in Hanford’s underground tanks into a stable glass form for disposal. The plant is supposed to start processing low-activity waste by the end of 2023.
While DOE is not submitting other bids for the work, interested parties can submit capability statements by July 29, according to the notice. Questions can be emailed to DOE Contracting Officer Jennifer Rooney, at [email protected].
