BWXT Completes C$80M Cambridge Expansion for Large Reactor Parts

According to BWXT's release, the work also enlarged what the company calls the world's largest commercial nuclear clean room by 40% and added more advanced manufacturing equipment. The project was launched in 2024 and has already created 200 jobs, and BWXT said it is targeting 200 more hires in Cambridge over the next year. World Nuclear News, which also reported the completion, describes the site as the largest commercial nuclear equipment plant in North America.

Two named programs show what the plant is for. BWXT said it is already building 48 new steam generators for the life extension and refurbishment of Ontario Power Generation's (OPG) Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, and it is fabricating the reactor pressure vessel for the Darlington small modular reactor (SMR). Both are Ontario projects that the company says its added capacity is meant to support.

Which Reactor Programs Need the Capacity

BWXT said Ontario is running the largest nuclear life-extension and new-build program on the continent: the life extension of 10 existing Candu reactors, plus the construction of GE Vernova Hitachi's BWRX-300 at the Darlington New Nuclear Project, according to World Nuclear News. OPG and Bruce Power are the key customers BWXT named. The company also tied the expansion to the Canadian government's Nuclear Energy Strategy, and Canada's energy minister Tim Hodgson and Ontario's energy minister Stephen Lecce both welcomed it in the release.

BWXT did not give a capacity figure for the finished plant, an order value, or a delivery schedule. In April 2024, World Nuclear News reported that BWXT expected the C$80 million program to lift its capacity for large nuclear components by 50%, with completion by the middle of 2026. The completion release repeats neither the 50% figure nor the mid-2026 date, and the 40% it cites is for the clean room, a different measure.

The Darlington Schedule Is Slipping

The timing matters because the reactor BWXT is supplying is behind. On Nov. 11, OPG said in its third-quarter results that Darlington SMR Unit 1 is no longer expected to meet its October 2030 commercial operation target or its C$7.7 billion estimate, as World Nuclear News reported. OPG put the cause on GE Vernova Hitachi's ongoing engineering for a first-of-a-kind design, which it said affects construction and supply chain performance, and said it expects to substantially complete a new cost and schedule assessment by mid-2027. Voltgrid covered that disclosure the day it came out.

Neither OPG nor BWXT links BWXT's vessel work to the delay, and nothing in either source says the Cambridge plant is a constraint. What the two documents do show together is that factory capacity for Ontario's large components was finished just as the project's reference unit lost its date.

Darlington matters beyond Ontario because the same BWRX-300 design is planned elsewhere. As Voltgrid reported, the Tennessee Valley Authority received the first US construction permit for the design at Clinch River on Sept. 29, so Darlington's supply chain and schedule are an early reference for US buyers. Neither source discusses data-center demand.

What BWXT has not said

The figures above come from BWXT’s release on its own site and from World Nuclear News, which agree; the USD56 million conversion is World Nuclear News’s. Still open are the plant’s new output capacity, when the Pickering steam generators and the Darlington vessel are due, and OPG’s revised Darlington cost and date, which it expects to have substantially complete by mid-2027.