BWX Technologies has agreed to license its small modular reactor design, a move that came after activist investor Ananym Capital spent months publicly campaigning for the company to commercialize the technology. The decision revives a nuclear project that was shelved nearly a decade ago, and it lands at a moment when demand for clean, reliable power to feed AI data centers has turned nuclear energy into a Wall Street priority.
Ananym Capital, which manages around $350 million and holds approximately 9% of BWXT’s portfolio, had been vocal about the opportunity. The firm’s thesis is straightforward: BWXT is sitting on a 180 megawatt pressurized water reactor design called mPower that it developed in the early 2010s, and the world finally wants what the company built too early.
A reactor design gets a second life
The mPower project has a complicated history. BWXT originally developed the small modular reactor design over a decade ago, positioning it as a next-generation nuclear solution. But between 2014 and 2017, the company quietly shelved the project. The reasons were prosaic: not enough customer demand and prohibitively high licensing costs.
Ananym Capital recognized this shift. On May 12, 2026, during the Sohn Investment Conference, the firm publicly urged BWXT to commercialize mPower. Co-founders Alex Silver and Charlie Penner, who launched Ananym in 2024, laid out a case that the reactor design could be a transformative asset rather than an intellectual property curiosity gathering dust on a shelf.
