Huntington Ingalls Industries this week officially made Kimberly Lebak the full-time president and general manager of the joint venture in charge of legacy cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Lebak has run the Huntington Ingalls-led Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B) since May when she stepped in for then-president Glenn Morgan, who announced he was leaving N3B to take a post with the corporate parent.
Lebak is a familiar face around the weapons complex. She joined Huntington Ingalls in 2018 after about 30 years with DOE, including a stint from 2014 to 2017 as manager of the Los Alamos Field Office for the semi autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the company said in a Tuesday press release.
At N3B, Lebak is in charge of the potential 10-year, $1.4-billion legacy remediation contract issued by the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM). The joint venture won the business in December 2017 and is still in its five-year base period, which runs through April 2023. Industry chatter has suggested DOE might take a hard look at the contractor’s performance before it signs off on the remaining two options periods of three-and-two years respectively.
In addition to shipping transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, some of the other high-priority work for N3B includes reining in an underground chromium plume at Los Alamos and remediation of contamination discovered last year on a public road outside the laboratory complex.
While with the government, Lebak garnered the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award, an honor given to only 1% of the federal senior executive service workforce, Huntington Ingalls said in the press release.
“Kim is well known from her numerous senior executive contributions in government, as well as her superior performance as an integral member of HII’s Nuclear and Environmental Services leadership team and as N3B’s environmental remediation program manager,” Michael Lempke, president of Huntington Ingalls’ Nuclear and Environmental Services business group, said in the release. “I have every confidence that Kim will skillfully fill the role of N3B president and general manager.”
The Office of Environmental Management should be more vigilant in tracking and correcting potential cyber security weaknesses, according to a report from the Department of Energy Office of Inspector General.
Based on a review of technical records from fiscal 2017 until fiscal 2019, over 400 “weaknesses” found by the Information Security Continuous Monitoring team at the Environmental Management (EM) office had not been recorded in a central tracking system, according to the audit, dated July 21 by the Inspector General’s Office of Technology, Financial and Analytics.
Certain weaknesses identified at the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office serving sites in Ohio and Kentucky were not followed up promptly, according to the report.
“Because sites had not tracked the 426 reported weaknesses noted above, it was unlikely that stakeholders had an accurate view of the overall cybersecurity and risk posture for Environmental Management’s systems and data and may have been unable to effectively ensure that weaknesses at various locations were addressed,” the OIG said in the 14-page audit.
Environmental Management “concurred with the report’s recommendation and indicated that corrective actions were taken to address the issues identified in the report,” the OIG said in the audit.
The Office of Environmental Management declined further comment this week.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will receive $5 million over five years from the Department of Energy thanks to an agreement announced this week.
The financial assistance parceled out from Aug. 1, 2021 through July 31, 2026, enables the National Academies’ Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board to continue its scientific information on issues such as waste handling, treatment, storage and disposal, according to a DOE press release.
In recent times the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board has been researching radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The cooperative agreement was originally awarded on Jan. 10, 2011 and was renewed for five years on Aug. 1, 201, according to DOE.
