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BWX Technologies bought a specialized uranium facility in Jonesborough and land in Oak Ridge as it grows in East Tennessee.Lynchburg, Virginia-based BWXT has around 8,700 employees across 15 major sites in the U.S. and Canada.The company produces fuel for U.S. Navy reactors at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin, Tennessee, but its services go far beyond subs and aircraft carriers.While it is no longer developing its own small modular reactor design, BWXT has contracts with multiple designers to supply reactor parts.

Which company produces uranium fuel for U.S. Navy nuclear reactors and manages the only plant where the government disassembles atomic warheads? What about the company helping NASA to develop a nuclear rocket, all while building small modular reactors and developing a pilot plant to restart uranium enrichment for the military?

It’s all the same answer: BWX Technologies, the $2.7 billion juggernaut better known as BWXT has embedded itself in every kind of nuclear project imaginable with a strong and growing presence in East Tennessee, where 1,100 employees at its Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin “downblend” bomb-grade uranium. The facility also creates fuel for the nuclear reactors aboard U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft carriers.

The region is even more important to BWXT after it bought a specialized facility in Jonesborough and 97 acres in Oak Ridge for a centrifuge enrichment project the company says will create hundreds of jobs through millions of dollars in investments.

“We have availed ourselves as a key player in just about every interesting nuclear opportunity that you can think of,” BWXT President and CEO Rex Geveden told Knox News. “We’re all over it.”

BWXT is part of the team led by the Tennessee Valley Authority to build the first small modular nuclear reactors in the U.S. at the federal utility’s Clinch River Nuclear Site in Oak Ridge.

It will manufacture the reactor pressure vessel, the largest component of the 300-megawatt reactor designed by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, for small modular reactors in the U.S. and Canada.

BWXT, based in Lynchburg, Virginia, employs around 8,700 people at 15 major manufacturing sites in the U.S. and Canada. It was created when the Babcock and Wilcox Company spun off into two separate publicly traded companies in 2015: Babcock and Wilcox Enterprises for power generation and BWXT for government and nuclear operations.

Here’s why the company is growing in East Tennessee and what the expansion says about the U.S. nuclear energy and national security sectors.

BWXT buys Tennessee plant, Oak Ridge land

BWXT likes to acquire companies that have “some precious capability or material,” Geveden said. He visited two of these companies April 24 on a visit to East Tennessee.

One is Nuclear Fuel Services, the sole provider of naval reactor fuel to the U.S. military, which BWXT bought in 2008. BWXT owns and operates the only two commercial facilities licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to handle and process highly enriched uranium, which is stockpiled at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge.

The nuclear fuel plant is the largest employer in Unicoi County and narrowly avoided extensive damage from Hurricane Helene last year.

Geveden also visited former defense contractor L3Harris’ Aerojet Ordnance Tennessee business in Jonesborough, the sole provider of depleted uranium to the U.S. government, which BWXT bought for $100 million in January. Depleted uranium is a highly dense byproduct of uranium enrichment used in armor-piercing ammunition and tank armor.

BWXT announced in January it would purchase the Canadian company Kinectrics for $525 million in a sale to close later this year. Kinectrics provides unique testing of nuclear materials and is building a helium test facility in Oak Ridge with X-energy, a company developing a gas-cooled small modular reactor.

Next door to the test facility at the Horizon Center Industrial Park in Oak Ridge, BWXT purchased 97 acres with help from the state of Tennessee to develop a pilot centrifuge plant for the U.S. government, the company announced April 15.

The U.S. store of highly enriched uranium for naval reactors is running low, and the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency within the Department of Energy that handles nuclear weapons, projects it will need a new source of the fuel by the early 2050s.

The agency chose BWXT to explore a pilot plant to restore a capability the U.S. lost at the end of the Cold War. BWXT could commercialize a centrifuge technology under development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“If you were building a nuclear company from scratch, you might build BWXT because we have this tremendous base business with the nuclear Navy,” Geveden said. “We’re utterly crucial to the nuclear national security apparatus.”

BWXT is involved in nuclear weapons activities. The National Nuclear Security Administration awarded a management contract for its Pantex plant in Texas, where it disassembles warheads and makes nuclear explosives, to a BWXT-led venture called PanTeXas Deterrence last year. The contract could last 20 years at a value of $30 billion.

Pantex and Y-12 were jointly managed by Consolidated Nuclear Security until last year, when Y-12 split off to focus on its growing workload of weapons modernization projects. Babcock and Wilcox managed Y-12 through a venture with engineering and construction firm Bechtel called B&W Y-12 from 2000 to 2014.

BWXT CEO: Tennessee ‘center of the nuclear universe’

BWXT has contracts to supply reactor parts to multiple developers of small modular reactors, including GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy and TerraPower, but is not pursuing its own reactor design today.

The company began developing a small modular reactor called the mPower reactor in 2009. It planned to build the reactor at TVA’s Clinch River Nuclear Site in partnership with Bechtel but pulled the plug on the project in 2017 after failing to secure enough funding.

“We were certainly pursuing our own small modular reactor back in the day, probably 10 years too soon, because the market just hadn’t materialized at that time,” Geveden said.

What’s changed now? For one thing, the chill from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan has worn off, Geveden said. The global environmental movement has widely embraced nuclear energy as a path toward a carbon-free electrical grid.

Around 61% of Americans support nuclear energy as a source of electricity, just one point shy of the 2010 record, according to a recent Gallup report. Advocates of nuclear energy say it can be a 24/7 foundation when solar and wind farms aren’t producing power.

“I think the world came around to the view that you can’t construct a grid ideologically. You’d better have some base load, or you’re gonna have constant brownouts and blackouts,” Geveden said.

Tennessee is among a handful of states – along with Texas, Virginia and Wyoming – vying for national leadership in new nuclear energy. Gov. Bill Lee invested more than $92 million for nuclear projects in his latest budget, including $50 million for TVA’s Clinch River project.

The state’s nuclear fund, totaling $70 million, has incentivized nuclear fusion firm Type One Energy and French nuclear fuels giant Orano to select the Knoxville region for major projects. The fund’s latest recipient is BWXT to support the company’s land acquisition in Oak Ridge with an eye to restoring America’s ability to enrich uranium for defense purposes.

“Tennessee is kind of right in the center of the nuclear universe,” Geveden said.

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CLARIFICATION: This report has been updated to reflect BWXT’s process of downblending creates bomb-grade uranium. The facility separately creates fuel for the nuclear reactors aboard U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft carriers.