Lynchburg’s BWXT unveils Innovation Campus

On Wednesday, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, federal and state officials and executives, engineers and employees of Lynchburg-based BWX Technologies gathered to celebrate the official opening of the nuclear company’s new Innovation Campus.

“The IQ level in this room is really high,” Youngkin joked.

Set on 11 acres in Campbell County, BWXT‘s Innovation Campus (which shares a name only with Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus in Alexandria) includes 170,000 square feet of offices and manufacturing space, which will house laboratories where the company’s Advanced Technologies business unit will design, build and test advanced nuclear systems for its clients, which include NASA, the Defense Department and commercial businesses.

With roots dating back to the mid-19th century, BWXT manufactures nuclear reactors, fuel and components. In 2021, then-Gov. Ralph Northam announced plans for BWXT’s $65 million Innovation Campus. The plan was to build a facility that would house 150 employees and serve as a research, development and production center for new microreactors and nuclear fuels.

Earlier that same year, Youngkin, then a candidate for governor, visited the Advanced Technologies team in Lynchburg at the invitation of BWXT President and CEO Rex D. Geveden.

Having Youngkin back on BWXT’s turf Wednesday, Geveden said, felt like “a full-circle moment.”

In 2021, BWXT’s Advanced Technologies unit had a business backlog of about $10 million , the company head explained Wednesday. Since then, he noted, the team has won $700 million in technology contracts. Now, it has more than 350 team members. “We’ve more than doubled the size of the organization,” Geveden said.

In a 2020 deal, BWXT divested its U.S.-based commercial nuclear services business to Lynchburg’s Framatome and acquired the 11 acres and a 118,000-square-foot building on Mt. Athos Road. That building was renovated and expanded to become the Innovation Campus.

To support development of the campus, BWXT received local and state tax grants worth up to $2 million, which are dependent on the company investing $65 million in the project and adding 97 jobs with salaries averaging $116,000 by the end of this year. 

By the end of 2024, BWXT had made considerable progress toward that goal, making $51 million in investments and hiring more than 115 employees, according to a company announcement.

Youngkin said Wednesday that since President Donald Trump moved into the White House, he has had more meetings than he “can possibly count” with members of the new administration.

“They firmly believe that the future of military propulsion, the future of space exploration, the future of our national security infrastructure to win the war of intelligence, the future of making sure that [when a health care provider at a hospital NICU] turns on a light, that it comes on … it is all grounded in nuclear,” Youngkin said.

BWXT will be able to help meet those demands and provide solutions for Virginia, which expects demand for energy to grow exponentially if data centers continue to be developed at the current pace, Youngkin added.

“I’m sorry [to] the rest of our national labs, [but] there’s no place else in the nation that is more prepared to step into this moment, to forge ahead at an expedited pace and deliver … the next generation of nuclear power into Virginia and America and the world,” the governor said of BWXT.

In September, DOD announced it had broken ground at the Idaho National Laboratory in preparation for the construction of the Project Pele transportable nuclear reactor, which is being manufactured by BWXT Advanced Technologies in Lynchburg.

“It is expensive, it is large, it is heavy, it is complicated,” Jeff Waksman, program manager for the Strategic Capabilities Office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said at the Innovation Campus event Wednesday. “It’s taking a long time.”

The goal, Waksman said, isn’t to build the one reactor, however. “If we just build one and it’s just a museum piece, then we have failed,” he said. “We have to make this a real ecosystem.”

Additionally, BWXT is working with Maryland’s Lockheed Martin to complete the final design of a nuclear reactor to be used in the first demonstration spacecraft using nuclear thermal propulsion known as the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, or DRACO.

“We are well past the paper reactor phase, and we are building real hardware at relevant scale that was developed on aggressive schedules,” Kate Kelly, director of space and emerging programs at BWXT Advanced Technologies, said Wednesday. “This is creating a path to deployment where we see the reality of sending these systems to space in the next several years.”