Inside Our Exclusive Terrestrial mPower License With BWXT
Applied Atomics is the right partner for the company that builds the U.S. Navy’s reactors.
We have an exclusive land-based licensing agreement with BWX Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: BWXT) for the mPower small modular reactor for use in the U.S., Canada, and beyond.
The generation III+ pressurized light water reactor has already benefitted from more than $500 million in engineering investment, completed extensive validation testing, and engaged the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
This article highlights our new partner, the technology we are bringing forward, and what this arrangement means for the work ahead.
BWXT and the mPower Reactor
BWXT is the sole manufacturer of the nuclear reactors that power the U.S. Navy’s submarine and carrier fleet, a role held by BWXT and its Babcock & Wilcox predecessor since the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, launched in 1954.
That fleet has run safely for seven decades. A 2025 Department of Energy report on the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program states that the Naval Reactors team “maintains an outstanding record of over 177 million miles safely steamed on nuclear power. The Program currently operates 97 reactors and has accumulated over 7,600 reactor-years of operation. A leader in environmental protection, the Program has published annual environmental reports since the 1960s.” The reactors that fleet runs on today are manufactured by BWXT.
The capacity to manufacture reliable nuclear reactors for the U.S. Navy is considered a strategic national capability, which is governed by federal statute. The Navy does not select a vendor for these systems. Instead, it maintains a relationship with the one organization the country trusts to deliver propulsion reactors that run continuously, often submerged and in conditions that allow no margin for failure, for decades on end. BWXT has continuously earned that trust across seven decades of disciplined engineering and manufacturing.
Headquartered in Lynchburg, Virginia, BWXT employs approximately 7,000 people across more than eighty sites. The company supplies nuclear fuel, components, and technical services to the U.S. government and to the commercial nuclear power industry.
—> Partnering with BWXT has massively accelerated our wholistic plant design work, and our licensing of this reactor IP is unique in the industry.
The Technology We Have Licensed
The mPower is a 195-megawatt Generation III+ small modular reactor. Its entire nuclear steam supply system is integrated into a single pressure vessel measuring seventy-five feet tall by fifteen feet in diameter, sized deliberately to be able to ship by rail on a standard flatcar. It runs on standard commercial nuclear fuel. It does not require river or coastal siting and requires less than less than 1% of water used in conventional plants with cooling towers when producing the same amount of electricity.
The significance of the design is what it eliminates. Traditional pressurized water reactors connect their primary components with large coolant pipes, and a rupture in one of those pipes is among the most serious accident scenarios in commercial nuclear safety. In mPower, the reactor core, control rod drives, once-through steam generators, and pressurizer are located inside a single integrated pressure vessel. The most consequential failure mode in conventional commercial nuclear is, in this design, physically prevented.
The Ramp Up
The mPower program began at Babcock & Wilcox in 2008. Over the next decade, more than $500 million was invested in design development, regulatory engagement, and engineering validation. The Department of Energy began its SMR Licensing Technical Support (LTS) program in 2012 to accelerate deployment of near term SMR projects, and the first grant awarded under DOE’s LTS program was for mPower. The Tennessee Valley Authority signed a letter of intent to host the first commercial deployment at the Clinch River site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The U.K. National Nuclear Laboratory recommended the design for further government investigation. The American Nuclear Society and the broader nuclear engineering community received the mPower as the most pragmatic and commercially credible SMR concept of its generation.
A full-scale, 120-foot hydraulic test loop was constructed at the Center for Advanced Engineering and Research in Bedford County, Virginia. The complete data archive from the Integrated Systems Test (IST) facility tests, covering passive cooling behavior, station blackout response, decay heat removal performance, and cyber-attack resilience of the digital instrumentation and control systems, is part of BWXT’s intellectual property, which we now have exclusive access to in addition to the IST facility.
The project was shelved officially in 2017 due to market conditions, not technical issues.
That market has dramatically changed. With it has come new reactor and fuel technology development companies. However, fusion and Gen IV reactor companies don’t know how much more money they need to reach the breakthroughs required to make their technologies commercially deployable, and they don’t know the construction timeline or full costs.
—> We’re committing to this Gen III+ design because it is currently the only viable option to provide a true risk profile to lenders and investors. We offer stability, reliability, and certainty.
What the Agreement Provides
Under the agreement, Applied Atomics holds the exclusive commercial rights to deploy the mPower reactor terrestrially across the United States, Canada, and other jurisdictions with comparable nuclear liability frameworks. BWXT retains ownership of the underlying intellectual property. Applied Atomics holds the deployment rights. BWXT is the exclusive manufacturer of all new, replacement, maintenance, and overhaul components for the reactor, which allows us to leverage expertise and facilities we’d have employed no matter the reactor design we chose.
The agreement is strengthened by firm commercial and manufacturing obligations from both parties.
We are a full-stack nuclear energy company that builds, deploys, and operates power plants. Our work stands on an engineering foundation that has already absorbed the development capital, the regulatory groundwork, and the validation testing others will spend a decade producing.
—> BWXT will continue to do what BWXT does best, which is to manufacture nuclear systems to the highest standards. We’ll do what we are built to do, which is to develop sites, secure customers, finance construction, bring the plants into operation, and generate firm clean power.
What Happens Next
The first work is regulatory. The mPower program completed pre-application engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission between 2009 and 2014. We re-engaged that pathway, building on the design certification work already on record. We’re targeting 2030 for our first commercial operation.
Our team is advancing site selection with a focus on industrial and technology customers whose load profiles match mPower’s modular output. The commercial market for firm, dispatchable, carbon-free power did not exist at scale when the mPower program was archived, but it exists now. Data centers, semiconductor fabrication, advanced manufacturing, and the electrification of transportation have changed the demand picture in ways that the utilities of 2015 could not have planned for, and the gas plants of today cannot adequately serve.
As we grow, we’ll share updates on site partnerships, regulatory milestones, customer commitments, and our team build-out. Speaking of team build-out —>