Base Power Priced Near Zero

The next time you find yourself on EDGAR, consider using my SECSift reader instead!

It turns SEC filings into clean, readable documents. Search every filing on EDGAR, get alerts on what changed, let AI highlight what matters and gray out the rest, and compare against previous filings.

Here’s a video I made recently demonstrating how you can use SECSift’s new alerts feature to keep track of EDGAR filings:

Not familiar with the reader? Here’s a 3-minute interactive demo (viewable on your computer) and another video I made walking through the entire tool.

🌾 Welcome to StableBread's Newsletter!

On September 30, 2026, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced FORTRESS America, a program to end the military’s reliance on foreign supply chains and the civilian power grid.

Here’s how the Department of War describes the energy goal:

Hegseth also signed a memo the same day making FORTRESS a formal Pentagon program, but it sets no budget, no deadline for the bases, and no required technology.

A May 2025 executive order already set one deadline, requiring an Army-regulated reactor to be running on a U.S. military base by September 30, 2028.

Currently, U.S. bases largely run on power from the civilian grid. The Pentagon is the country’s largest electricity consumer, and “almost none of that power comes from anything the DOD owns and controls,” according to the Atlantic Council in August 2026.

Interestingly, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s audit arm, flagged the risk 17 years ago (back in 2009), when it found 31 of the Pentagon’s 34 most critical assets relied on the commercial grid as their main power source.

That led me to the question: What can power a military base around the clock, for years, without the grid or fuel deliveries?

If you’ve read my past write-ups on Fuel Tech (FTEK) and Fluence (FLNC), you’ll know on-site gas turbines and solar-plus-battery systems fall short here, since (1) the turbines still need natural gas piped in from off the base, and (2) the batteries store hours of power, not days.

So the Army is turning to microreactors, nuclear reactors small enough to ship by truck and able to run for years without refueling. In August 2026, it chose five companies for Janus, a program expected to put more than 20 commercial microreactors on military bases, with up to $2.2B of its own money through fiscal 2031.

One of the five already builds the reactors for the Navy’s submarines and aircraft carriers.

That company is BWX Technologies (NYSE: BWXT), a ~$13.3B nuclear manufacturer based in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Most of its revenue comes from making reactors and reactor fuel for the Navy, and processing uranium for the government’s nuclear weapons and fuel programs. A faster-growing commercial arm supplies components and maintenance for nuclear power plants in Canada and the U.S.

But even after a 7.6% jump on October 6, 2026, the stock is down 38.9% from its $238.42/share peak on April 15, 2026:

BWXT didn’t fall alone. The VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF (NLR) is down 33.4% from its January high, even after rising 5.5% on October 6. Curtiss-Wright (CW), which supplies pumps and valves for the same submarines and carriers, is down 30.2% from its July high.

So BWXT got caught in a broader nuclear and defense selloff, but it fell further than both NLR and CW after guiding to slower growth in 2027.

Meanwhile, BWXT’s business got stronger on four fronts:

At $145.70/share, BWXT has a market cap of $13.35B and an enterprise value of $15.0B ($13.35B + $2.05B of debt - $0.40B of cash). It trades at 22.5x 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance and 30.7x non-GAAP EPS guidance.

In return, you get an $8.4B backlog, more than double the $4.0B BWXT had at the end of 2023. And on NTM estimates, its EV/EBITDA has dropped to 20.9x from ~35x in March, back to its 2024 levels.

So is the Navy’s reactor supplier on sale, or does the market see a slowdown the numbers don’t show yet?

In this ~6,800-word deep dive, I cover how BWXT became the Navy’s reactor supplier, where its growth comes from, what military base power and data centers are worth to BWXT today, and the management, insider selling, and financials behind the plan. Then I conclude with what $145.70/share already assumes and whether I’m buying.

BWXT builds nuclear reactors and their heavy components, manufactures nuclear fuel, then services reactors once they’re running. It reports two segments:

Naval propulsion is the core, at “a little bit less than 1/2” of revenue, CEO Rex Geveden said at the September 29 Investor Day. Special materials (the government uranium business) makes up 15-20%, and commercial power ~30%.

He also expects $3.7B of BWXT’s $3.8B of 2026 revenue to come from nuclear.

The U.S. government accounted for 68% of 2025 revenue, directly or through prime contractors, down from 76% in 2024 as the commercial side grew. Four large utilities accounted for another 17%, per the FY2025 10-K.

What keeps the Navy from switching suppliers is licensing. Only two plants in the U.S. hold Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licenses to produce fuel from high-enriched uranium (HEU, enriched to 20% or more, which is what naval reactors run on).

Both belong to BWXT (Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Tennessee, and its Lynchburg plant), and the 10-K calls Nuclear Fuel Services “the sole provider of nuclear fuel for the U.S. Navy.”

Here’s the delivery record BWXT leans on:

So how did a boiler maker founded in 1867 become the Navy’s reactor supplier?