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Saturday, October 10, 2026

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Neither of the two commercial prospects BWX Technologies $BWXT has named for its BANR microreactor is a data center. 1) Prodigy Clean Energy, a Montreal-based developer of factory-built nuclear plants: Two BANRs for a transportable pilot plant in Belledune, New Brunswick, built mainly at $BWXT’s Ontario plants and running in the early 2030s. New Brunswick’s government signed a letter of intent (LOI) to buy the power. $BWXT and Prodigy are still negotiating a definitive agreement, and the release provides no dollar value. 2) Tata Chemicals Soda Ash: A Wyoming soda ash producer that signed an LOI to explore deploying up to eight BANRs. $BWXT also markets BANR to data centers. However, I found no data center contract, customer, LOI, or revenue in any $BWXT press release from January 2025 through October 2026, in the FY2025 10-K, or in the 2026 10-Qs. $BWXT’s own mentions stop at a product page saying BANR can provide “clean electricity for municipalities, data centers and campuses,” and slides 11 and 25 from its Investor Day on September 29, 2026, which list “AI/data center demand” as a driver of nuclear demand in general. I didn’t hear the phrase “data center” mentioned once during Investor Day, and slide 49 lists data centers in the third phase of $BWXT’s microreactor plan. CEO Rex Geveden said at Investor Day that “the incremental demand from AI right now is 60 GW” and “winning at AI means winning at power, and winning at power probably means having a nuclear solution.” If he’s right, $BWXT benefits by supplying components, fuel, and services to more reactors, not by selling microreactors to data centers. Advanced Reactor Design and Engineering, the product line that includes Project Pele (its prototype microreactor for the Pentagon) and $BWXT’s other microreactor programs, brought in $203.8M in 2024 and $147.1M in 2025, then $52.6M in H1 2026, down from $69.8M a year earlier. At 3.0% of $BWXT’s $1,761.8M of H1 2026 revenue, microreactors are still a small, early business.
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Fajasy on X

BWX Technologies $BWXT is in military base power three ways, through (1) Project Pele, a prototype reactor it’s building for the Pentagon, (2) the TRISO fuel its microreactors run on, and (3) Janus, the Army program that chose $BWXT’s commercial reactor for Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Pele is a 1.5-megawatt (MW) transportable, gas-cooled microreactor built for the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office under a 2022 award. $BWXT delivered its full TRISO fuel core to Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in December 2025, received the Department of Energy’s (DOE) preliminary safety approval in September 2026, and targets delivering the reactor to INL in 2027. TRISO (tri-structural isotropic) fuel, which the Department of Energy calls “the most robust nuclear fuel on earth,” packs uranium into particles coated in carbon and ceramic layers. $BWXT produces TRISO at Lynchburg “in the hundreds of kilograms quantities,” Joe Miller, president of Government Operations, said at its Investor Day on September 29, 2026. It also supplied the fuel for Antares, a microreactor startup whose reactor was the first new reactor to reach criticality (a self-sustaining chain reaction) under DOE’s reactor pilot program in June 2026. POWER magazine, a power-industry trade publication, reports $BWXT is “the only Janus vendor that self-supplies its TRISO fuel.” $BWXT is also negotiating a commercial TRISO plant in Wyoming with Kairos Power, an advanced reactor developer, at up to $500M of capex. CFO Mike Fitzgerald said at Investor Day that $BWXT needs to see high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU, the 5-20% enriched uranium most advanced reactors need) become available before committing to the plant, and “probably will not make a decision on that for a little while.” The Army chose BANR (the BWXT Advanced Nuclear Reactor), a 20 MWe (megawatts of electricity) gas-cooled design scaled up from Pele, for Fort Campbell. $BWXT plans to start construction at the site in late 2028 and have the reactor running in the early 2030s. Three details matter here: 1) No contract value: $BWXT’s release describes “a phased contracting approach.” For comparison, the Janus agreement for Radiant, a microreactor startup, is worth up to $750M. 2) $BWXT will own the reactor: The Army chose vendors “to own, construct and operate nuclear microreactors” ($BWXT’s release), under fixed-price, milestone-based agreements in which the Army pays at milestones rather than buying power. 3) Not first in line: With operation in the early 2030s, $BWXT’s reactor won’t meet the September 30, 2028 deadline a May 2025 executive order set for an Army-regulated reactor running on a U.S. military base. Radiant and Antares, two of the other Janus vendors, both target 2028 for their first reactors. After Radiant’s agreement, $1.45B of the program’s $2.2B is left, and an even split among the other four vendors would give $BWXT ~$360M over fiscal 2027-2031, or $72M/year, under 2% of 2026 revenue guidance.
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Fajasy on X

The S&P 500 lost 18% in 2022, and the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate, the main U.S. bond index, lost 13%, its worst year since it began in 1976. Over the same year, $XLE, the S&P 500 energy sector ETF, returned 64%, gold was flat, and cash earned ~1.5%. Now what if I told you there's a framework that would've said to own cash and energy in 2022, not stocks and bonds? That framework is called Gave's Four Quadrants, after Charles Gave, co-founder of Gavekal, a macro research firm. It uses two ratios built from market prices, the S&P 500 vs. Oil and Gold vs. Treasuries, to place the economy in one of four environments, and it describes what to own and what to avoid in each. Here's how stocks, bonds, gold, and cash tend to perform in each environment: → Deflationary boom: Stocks, bonds, and cash rise, and gold underperforms. → Inflationary boom: Stocks and gold rise, cash does very little, and bonds fall. → Deflationary bust: Bonds and cash rise, gold stays fairly stable, and stocks fall. → Inflationary bust: Gold and cash rise, while stocks and bonds fall. In my backtest of Gave's rules from 1970 to September 2026, a portfolio split equally between cash, the S&P 500, and either 10-year Treasuries or gold, whichever the framework favored, would have returned 5.7% per year after inflation. Its max drawdown was 28%, vs. 54% for the S&P 500. As of the end of September 2026, the two ratios place the U.S. in an inflationary boom phase. But since January 2025, the S&P 500 to gold ratio has been below its 7-year average, which has often come a few months before the S&P 500 to oil ratio drops below its own 7-year average. If that happens, the U.S. is back in an inflationary bust phase, like 2022. So how do you read the two ratios yourself, and what do they say to own today? That's what I walk through in my new ~20-minute video!
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Fajasy on X

The Navy plans to buy more ships, and BWX Technologies $BWXT doesn’t charge a set price per reactor. $BWXT makes the fuel, reactor cores, steam generators, and other reactor components for the Navy’s Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines and Ford-class carriers. $BWXT now produces two to three of these reactors/year, Joe Miller, president of Government Operations, said at its Investor Day on September 29, 2026. The Navy buys under multi-year pricing agreements, so orders arrive in large blocks: → February 2025: $2.1B of naval reactor component contracts. → July 2025: $2.6B, including options. → May 2026: $1.45B, mostly long-lead material (parts ordered years before a ship is built) under the first of five annual task orders through 2030. → October 2026: $189M of naval fuel, to be completed by August 2027. $BWXT’s plants carry large fixed costs, so final pricing depends on how many ship sets (all the reactor components for one ship) the Navy orders, CFO Mike Fitzgerald said at Investor Day. The Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan, released in May, calls for (1) “buying two attack boats per year for the next 30 years,” meaning Virginia-class submarines, (2) a new carrier every four years instead of every five, and (3) 15 nuclear-powered Trump-class battleships, per USNI News, the U.S. Naval Institute’s news service. $BWXT’s own read of the plan is naval growth of 4-6%/year from the existing ship classes. Each Ford-class ship set takes ~8 years to deliver, so ordering a carrier every five years left gap years with one ship set in $BWXT’s plants instead of two. CEO Rex Geveden said on the Q2 call that the four-year cadence takes out “that revenue bathtub that we’ve been going through” and has “a bigger volume impact than even adding a battleship.” The next carrier’s long-lead orders come in 2028, but Fitzgerald said at Investor Day the faster cadence won’t really show up in $BWXT’s numbers until around 2030. A Trump-class battleship would use one Ford-class reactor (a carrier uses two), so $BWXT could build the reactor on its existing lines, but Congress still has to fund the program. Fitzgerald said $BWXT’s 2030 targets exclude the battleship program, so congressional funding would be extra growth.

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