Sunday, October 18, 2026

@StableBread Oct 9 2 clicks

Fajasy on X

“Tens of billions of new opportunity” is how BWX Technologies $BWXT CEO Rex Geveden describes uranium enrichment, the middle of the nuclear fuel chain. After naval reactors, $BWXT’s other big government business is uranium, which it calls special materials. It covers processing, downblending (diluting Cold War-era high-enriched uranium into lower-enriched fuel), and now enrichment for defense use. $BWXT says revenue grew from ~$285M in 2023 to ~$550M in 2026 guidance, 24%/year, and expects high-single to low-double-digit growth from there to 2030. Geveden named its two largest growth programs on the August 3 call, high-purity depleted uranium (HPDU) and defense fuels enrichment. $BWXT’s release on its purchase of Aerojet Ordnance Tennessee (A.O.T.) from L3Harris $LHX calls the unit the “sole provider of depleted uranium to the U.S. government.” Nine months after the purchase closed, $BWXT won a $1.6B, 10-year contract to produce up to 300 metric tons/year of HPDU at A.O.T.’s Jonesborough, Tennessee site. HPDU is depleted uranium metal refined to the purity the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of Energy (DOE) agency running the nuclear weapons complex, needs at its Y-12 plant to maintain the deterrent. Construction starts in late 2026, per $BWXT’s Investor Day on September 29, 2026. For defense fuels, the military needs unobligated uranium, meaning uranium free of the peaceful-use pledges attached to foreign-supplied material. An August 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s audit arm, says the last U.S. plant able to enrich unobligated material, the Paducah plant in Kentucky, stopped in 2013. In September 2025, NNSA awarded $BWXT a sole-source contract valued at $1.5B to license, build, and run a pilot enrichment plant at Erwin, Tennessee, per the same report. $BWXT built a centrifuge manufacturing facility in Oak Ridge in seven months, plans to test its first prototype centrifuge by the end of 2026, and expects to file the Erwin license application in Q1 2027, with the plant running ~2035. Enrichment sits in the middle of the fuel chain, between uranium producers like Energy Fuels $UUUU and fuel plants like Erwin. The Investor Day deck says what’s “required to meet defense fuel needs through 2052” is $36.8B or more, citing the GAO and $BWXT’s own estimates. NNSA projects enough high-enriched uranium for naval propulsion “until the 2050s,” and enough unobligated low-enriched uranium for tritium (a hydrogen isotope used in nuclear warheads) through the early 2040s, per the same GAO report. Still, $BWXT earns revenue while it develops, licenses, and builds the plant, which is why the enrichment program drove most of the government segment’s Q2 2026 revenue growth.