Nuclear Naval reactor maker BWX Technologies is out of the submarine missile tube building business after completing its contracted work for the U.S. Navy and allied fleets in 2023, the company’s chief executive said on Feb. 27.
BWXT makes Common Missile Compartment tubes at its factory in Mount Vernon, Ind. The tubes are designed to fit the U.S. Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, plus the United Kingdom’s planned Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines.
Within a total $28 million in benefits recovered from non-nuclear components in the fourth quarter of 2023, BWX enjoyed $11 million from closing out the missile tube work it was contracted in 2014 by General Dynamics Electric Boat to perform.
“We completed the missile tubes program on a strong footing despite some challenges along the way,” Chief Executive Rex Gevenden told Wall Street analysts during a Tuesday earnings call. “In the fourth quarter, we finished better than expected delivering a positive final [estimate at completion] related to that close out, in addition to a final settlement with our customer to account for the previous cost growth that was driven by out-of-scope changes and absorbed by BWXT over the past couple of years.”
BWXT Nuclear Operations Group in 2017 was awarded an extension, worth $76.2 million, to the original contract to manufacture additional Common Missile Compartment tube assemblies. Tubes of this kind will be used on future U.S. Columbia-class nuclear submarines, Virginia-class attack submarines, which do not carry nuclear weapons, and future U.K. Dreadnoughts, which will.
That Block II award was the third contract that BWXT received from submarine prime General Dynamics Electric Boat to manufacture missile tubes. Two previous Block I contracts were awarded in November 2014 and March 2016. The 2017 deal accounted for half of the available CMC tube assembly work, the company said in a statement at the time.
In 2018, the Navy acknowledged that BWXT incorrectly welded a dozen missile tubes that the company was building as a subcontractor to Columbia-class prime General Dynamics Electric Boat.
The company in 2020 considered walking away from future work building tubes for U.S. nuclear subs. Babcock Marine and BAE Systems Custom Components are the only other two U.S. companies capable of building the tubes, which hold Tomahawk cruise missiles on Virginia-class attack subs and on Ohio– and Columbia-class boats house Lockheed Martin-made Trident II missiles. Those missiles are tipped with W76 and W88 nuclear warheads on the U.S. boats and Trident-Holbrook warheads, a W76 derivative, on the U.K. boats.
