Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] and U.K.-based defense contractor Babcock International signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on civilian- and naval-nuclear decommissioning, the companies said Monday.
“That’s everything from power plant design and construction on a global basis to component design and fabrication and construction, principally in North America and the U.K., to begin with,” Michael Lempke, president of the Nuclear and Environmental Group at Huntington Ingalls Industries, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
In addition to that, “you can see the easy overlap in nuclear ship decommissioning…in U.K. submarines, right out of the gate as you start to look at where we are in the lifecycle for U.K. submarines,” Lempke said.
The companies announced their memorandum of understanding in a press release.
HII and Babcock also said they will explore how they can contribute to the trilateral AUKUS program, under which the U.S. and the U.K. will provide Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines armed with conventional weapons.
“AUKUS is probably the single-largest community of opportunities to come up in this space for quite some time,” Lempke said. “It is ripe for the collaborative application of United States and United Kingdom capabilities.”