Army selects 5 companies to build nuclear microreactors on bases, under new $2 billion deal

Army officials have selected five firms to build nuclear microreactors at U.S. military bases as a bid to create energy independence, though the nation still relies heavily on imported enriched uranium for such projects. 

The service and the Defense Innovation Unit unveiled the initiative, dubbed “Project Janus,” at last year’s Association of the U.S. Army Conference in Washington, D.C. Now, officials are awarding up to $2.2 billion to the pool of five companies through a milestone-based Other Transaction Authority contract with fixed-price milestones to build out their microreactor technology on Army bases. Those firms and bases, announced on Wednesday, are: 

• Antares Nuclear, Inc. – Fort Bragg, North Carolina
• BWXT Advanced Technologies, LLC – Fort Campbell, Kentucky
• General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems – Fort Hood, Texas
• Radiant Industries, Inc. – Fort Benning, Georgia
• Westinghouse Government Services – Fort Drum, New York

“We now know that our domestic electric grid is potentially at risk in a conflict. We also know that we will not necessarily be able to move fossil fuels easily wherever we need them to go,” said Jeff Waksman, the Army’s principal deputy assistant secretary for installations, energy and environment. “Right now, all critical infrastructure that the Army has is backed up by some form of liquid fossil fuel, primarily diesel. So that makes nuclear energy just a natural game changer for the Army.”

Janus project officials said with additional private investment from the firms, they anticipate up to 20 microreactors across the bases. The service competition paves the way for a program of record to deliver a small nuclear powerplant to an Army installation by 2028. Currently, the U.S. doesn’t have operational nuclear microreactors, and the country only enriches a very small percentage of the world’s uranium supply. Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration efforts to grow the supply and produce high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, are still underway. However, service officials remain optimistic the supply chain problems will not set back their microreactor plans.

“We expect sufficient prioritization to ensure that we have the uranium that we need for our fastest moving reactors,” Waksman said, acknowledging that the microreactor effort is “probably going to push beyond what our supplies are as a nation.”

“This is really an all-of-government effort. We are tied in very closely with the folks at DOE and NNSA, trying to stand up new enrichment capability, and we will do what we can to deliver what we need through stockpile, and then to hopefully have fresh enrichment capable of delivering some of the HALEU for the later reactors in this program.”

In November, the Army named nine bases as finalists for the microreactors, but  excluded Fort Wainwright, Alaska; Holston Army Ammunition Plant, Tennessee; Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington; and Redstone Arsenal, Alabama; from the final five. 

Waksman said it was a “matching process” between the firms and the sites, and some contractors prefer to work in certain areas due to their relationships with utility companies near the bases they were paired up with. While one of the goals of the Janus Project is to cut down on energy supply chain issues for U.S. bases overseas, planners said they want to prove the technology can work stateside first.

“The intent here is to choose the lowest hanging fruit, we want to choose sites that we think are going to be the cheapest and fastest to deploy and the easiest,” Waksman said. “This is already very difficult. There's a reason no one has actually built a fully operational commercial nuclear microreactor before, so we don't want to make this harder on ourselves by trying to deliver this to some island or some foreign country. We want to demonstrate that we can do this here in the 50 U.S. states, and then if this is a success, then we can talk about possibly deploying somewhere else in the future.”

Project Janus is not the first military microreactor initiative. The Army is taking lessons from Project Pele, the Defense Department’s mobile reactor project, and based the contracting mechanism off of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program.

The Army’s selection of firms also follows an Air Force initiative to build a nuclear microreactor at Eielson Air Force Base, near Fairbanks, Alaska. Waksman said the Army should have an announcement in the “not too distant future” about how the services are working together on those projects.