Non-executive board chair John Fees will end a 43-year career with BWX Technologies and its predecessor companies on May 3, the Lynchburg, Va.-based naval nuclear reactor provider, fuel fabricator and defense-nuclear site-manager announced Wednesday in a regulatory filing.
Fees, who has been the non-executive chairman since 2018, will retire after the company’s board of directors meets next summer, according to an 8-K filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
“Mr. Fees’ retirement was not the result of any dispute or disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to its operations, policies or practices,” BWX Technologies (BWXT) wrote in Wednesday’s filing.
Fees is the former chief executive officer of McDermott International, from which BWXT was spun off in 2010. From then until 2018, he was executive chairman of the current company. The period coincided with the latter years of the company’s management and operations contracts at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
BWXT was off the job at those sites by 2014, after a lengthy protest of the award to incumbent Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS), a Bechtel-led company, but is now in the hunt for the follow-on to the CNS deal — an award, potentially worth just under $28 billion over 10 years, with options, was expected this fall after a competition prolonged by the pandemic and a presidential election.
