BWX Technologies

BWX Technologies traces its lineage to the Babcock and Wilcox boiler company founded in 1867, but it became the company known today in July 2015, when Babcock and Wilcox split into two public companies and the nuclear side, headquartered in Lynchburg, Virginia, kept the BWXT name and Wall Street ticker. Its central business, run through the Nuclear Operations Group, is one only a handful of companies in the world can do: manufacturing naval nuclear reactor components for the US Navy's submarine and aircraft carrier fleets. BWXT builds reactor cores and components for Virginia and Columbia-class submarines and Ford-class carriers, work that runs through Lynchburg along with plants in Ohio and Indiana, and recent contract awards for naval reactor components have run into the billions of dollars as the Navy tries to keep pace with submarine construction schedules. The same government side of the business extends into the National Nuclear Security Administration's weapons complex.

BWXT manages and operates the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the country's enriched uranium and weapons component work is done, and leads Pantex Deterrence, the joint venture running the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, the final assembly and disassembly site for the US nuclear weapons stockpile. A 2025 award under NNSA's Defense Fuels program tasks BWXT with reestablishing domestic uranium enrichment capacity, starting with low enriched production and moving toward the highly enriched uranium the Navy's reactors need, a capability the country lost decades ago and has been trying to rebuild. Nuclear Fuel Services, a subsidiary based in Erwin, Tennessee, makes TRISO fuel, CANDU reactor fuel, and other specialized nuclear fuel products for both government and commercial customers. On the civil side, BWXT Nuclear Energy has continuously manufactured nuclear steam generators and heavy components for commercial power plants since the 1950s, making it one of North America's few remaining suppliers of that kind of equipment, and the company has pushed further into small modular reactors and microreactors, including work under the Defense Department's Project Pele program to build a transportable microreactor for military bases.

BWXT Medical, a newer arm, produces medical isotopes used in cancer diagnostics and treatment, a business that grew out of the same radiochemistry expertise that supports its defense work. A Technical Services Group runs complex, high consequence site operations for the government, including management of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. BWXT employs around 7,800 people, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under BWXT, and occupies a position in the defense industrial base that is narrow but close to irreplaceable: it is effectively the sole domestic source for several categories of naval reactor and nuclear weapons components, which makes its work as much a matter of national security policy as commercial contracting.