The Army is taking the next step in its ambitions to start using small nuclear reactors to power critical infrastructure on at least some of its bases. This week, the service started the solicitation process for its Janus program via the Defense Innovation Unit, while also announcing some of the first bases that are most likely to host the new miniature nuclear generators.

Officials want to test the feasibility of using the microreactors to deal with what they say are several problems: frequent electrical outages, increasing power demands, and a limited menu of backup generation alternatives. The Army says it is convinced that the commercial technology behind the latest generation of reactors is viable — the big question is cost.

So this week, through the Defense Innovation Unit’s Commercial Solutions Opening, the Army released a solicitation asking vendors to propose microreactor designs that the service will use to test its resilience goals on nine separate bases between now and 2030.

“What resilience means to us is that we have power no matter what, 24/7, and right now, that resiliency is provided 100% by fossil fuels,” Dr. Jeff Waksman, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment, told reporters at the recent Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington. “With fossil fuels, you have a certain number of days of backup power, but that is a huge vulnerability, particularly if you start to look at like Arctic locations or Pacific locations. So the only technologies that we have now that could be possibly applied to Arctic or Pacific locations to provide 24/7 power for a long length of time is nuclear power. It’s the only option that we have right now.”

Cost considerations

Waksman said the Army is confident the commercial nuclear industry can support the service’s ambitions — and meet a Trump administration goal to have at least one Army-regulated nuclear reactor up and running on a domestic military base by 2028.

For now, the biggest question is cost. And for the time being, officials aren’t even sure exactly how to define the cost-effectiveness of a nuclear option.

“It’s a hard question, and it’s going to eventually be an Army senior leader discussion. And the question is, how much are we willing to pay for resiliency? That’s still an open question, and that’s going to be part of what we’re going to try to figure out here,” he said. “I don’t think we need to meet absolute parity with fossil fuels, but I think we’ve got to be reasonably close. But if you just go out to Hawaii or Alaska, they’re already paying upwards of 40 cents per kilowatt hour. So these reactors don’t need to be 10 or 12 cents a kilowatt hour to be parity. They need to be something like 40 or 50 cents a kilowatt hour. I think there’s going to be a big market for them. But exactly what the number is, that’s part of what we need to figure out for the next few years.”

Supply chain

But Waksman said there are other reasons for the Army to get involved now, beyond just determining the cost-effectiveness of commercial nuclear technologies.

He said the Army also wants to influence the development of the U.S. nuclear industry. And not necessarily with funding — there’s already plenty of that in private markets, with several companies having raised hundreds of millions of dollars to develop their reactor designs. He said the nuclear industry is already “very hot.”

“Now is the perfect time for the government to get involved, because there are multiple nuclear startups that have now gone public and have market caps of over a billion dollars. The problem is you have a dozen different companies with a dozen different supply chains, and there’s no way that that’s going to actually work — we’re going to have to neck this down,” he said. “For a comparison in aviation, Boeing and Airbus are vehement enemies, but they use a lot of the same supply chain, because having two fully parallel supply chains doesn’t make sense for airplanes. That’s part of the role that we’re going to play here, as these companies are developing their designs, is trying to help squeeze them into similar supply chains … that will not only give more options to these companies, but it also encourages these suppliers to actually expand and make assembly line components, because right now, nuclear reactor components tend to be one-off, custom, handmade components.”

As part of the partnership with DIU, the Army plans to use an iterative prototyping process, via other transaction agreements (OTAs), to test the reactor designs on nine bases, which were also announced this week. They are:

• Fort Benning, Georgia
• Fort Bragg, North Carolina
• Fort Campbell, Kentucky
• Fort Drum, New York
• Fort Hood, Texas
• Fort Wainwright, Alaska
• Holston Army Ammunition Plant, Tennessee
• Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington
• Redstone Arsenal, Alabama

At each of those sites, the companies selected are expected to start by building a “first of a kind” reactor, then use lessons learned to improve on that commercial design with a “second of a kind.”

Making nuclear “sexy” again

Waksman said there’s a precedent for that kind of government involvement — both in terms of technology and in workforce development. The Army is trying to emulate the model NASA used to spur development of the space industry through its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program.

“When NASA wanted to start commercial rocketry, they started at the COTS competition, and that was the competition that basically created SpaceX. SpaceX took an industry where the A students in engineering didn’t want to go into rockets, it wasn’t cool, and SpaceX made it cool again, and suddenly you had all the really smart engineers on campus wanted to get into space and rocketry,” he said. “Nuclear needs its SpaceX. There are these innovative, exciting startups, and we’re hoping to cultivate them in the same way that NASA cultivated SpaceX, make nuclear sexy again, and encourage more of the top young engineering talent to want to go in the field. Because right now, there’s a tremendous shortage.”

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