The U.S. Navy has awarded Bechtel Plant Machinery $1.5 billion worth of contracts for naval nuclear propulsion components, the Pentagon announced Friday.
The money is spread across a pair of Naval Sea Systems Command contracts: one worth about $890 million, another valued at roughly $615 million, according to the Department of Defense.
“No completion date or additional information is provided on Naval Nuclear Propulsion program contracts,” the agency wrote in its contract award notice. Bechtel will perform the work in Monroeville, Pa., and Schenectady, N.Y., according to the department.
Bechtel Plant Machinery builds nuclear power plant components for both surface ships and submarines. The Navy and its contractors are not presently building new nuclear-armed submarines, but the service plans to procure the first of 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines in 2021.
Bechtel designed the Columbia-class reactor, known as S1B. The Navy sought and received roughly $190 million in research and development funding for the Columbia reactor in the Pentagon fiscal 2019 budget bill signed in September.
Bechtel also designed the A1B reactor for the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier.
Editor’s note, Dec. 14, 2018, 9:00 AM Eastern: the story was corrected to say that Bechtel designed certain naval reactors.
