WASHINGTON — The US Army has whittled down its nuclear microreactor vendor pool, divvying up to $2.2 billion to five companies to build out and test their prototypes for eventual use on military installations.
“Unlike in prior conflicts, 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,” Jeff Waksman — the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment — told reporters today while announcing the awards for the Janus program, the service’s effort to field nuclear microreactors on US military installations.
“That makes nuclear energy just a natural game changer for the Army,” he added. “It makes sense for the Army to take the lead here.”
As of today, the service has tapped five companies to continue working on their respective microreactor designs with the goal of having them deliver more than 20 microreactors to Army installations and then be contractor owned and operated:
- Antares will outfit Fort Bragg, N.C.;
- BWXT is tapped for Fort Campbell, Ky.;
- General Atomics at Fort Hood, Texas;
- Radiant is slated to bring its microreactors to Fort Benning, Ga; and
- Westinghouse is eyed for Fort Drum, N.Y.
But that list could be whittled down further, Waksman warned, since all five companies are still developing and testing their respective designs and raising money to cover the costs.
Waksman explained that each of the five companies now has a unique Other Transaction Authority-based agreement for a share of that $2.2 billion pot that will be spent between fiscal 2027 and 2031. Those funds are designed to help cover the design and construction of the prototypes, along with the first year of operations.
While the Army did not outline how much each company was awarded from that larger $2.2 billion pot, Radiant disclosed it could receive up to $750 million under the Janus program to develop and deploy 15 of its Kaleidos microreactors.
However, those government dollars are only expected to provide the companies with a fraction of what they need to get ready for prime time.
“These companies are still working to raise money off of this announcement. … We are expecting that the majority of the money coming into these reactor programs will be private capital, not government,” Waksman told reporters.
And each agreement, he added, has a unique set of milestones to help determine if a company is paid and proceeds onward.
“These contractual milestones are very flexible,” Waksman said. “So if a company is not performing, if they are just disappointing, not delivering what we’re expecting, we can pull future milestones. There are no termination fees.”
The goal is to have at least one microreactor up and running on an Army installation by the end of September 2028.
Gearing Up For 2028
In May 2025, President Donald Trump inked a series of executive orders related to nuclear energy, including one tapping the Army to take charge of a nuclear reactor push inside the Pentagon and have one operating on a domestic base by the end of September 2028.
Over the ensuing year, the service moved out on various initiatives including work with the Defense Innovation Unit on Janus.
The duo initially identified in November eligible commercial microreactor vendors and nine sites as possible “optimal locations for initial deployment.” In addition to the five bases announced today, that list of possible sites included Fort Wainwright, Holston Army Ammunition Plant, Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Redstone Arsenal.
“This was an extraordinarily rigorous competition to determine which companies really have the best possibility to build commercial nuclear microreactors,” Waksman said today.
“We don’t expect all five of these companies are going to turn on a reactor in 2028. In fact, they definitely will not,” he later added. “But we do believe we have a very practical pathway to delivering at least one of these reactors on/by September 30, 2028.”
Since each company is moving out with its own respective plans for developing the small nuclear reactors from the footprint and movability of the reactors to the fuel they use.
For example, Radiant’s Chief Nuclear Officer Rita Baranwal told Breaking Defense that the company’s design uses fuel made to its specifications for its reactor. The Department of Energy, she explained, provided Radiant with 19.75 percent high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU). The company’s fuel fabricator, Standard Nuclear, then used that HALEU “feedstock” to produce Tristructural Isotropic (TRISO) fuel particles for the fuel compacts for the reactors core.
Like Radient, Antares is also using the 19.75 percent HALEU and having BWXT fabricate its TRISO fuel particles, a company official told Breaking Defense earlier this summer, while General Atomics’s Tactical Energy System is fueled by uranium zirconium hydride.
The Army’s push to field those nuclear microreactors comes amid a larger service initiative to alter course on plans to power installations. Earlier this month, Waksman announced that a 2024 memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for using green energy had been scrapped, and the duo were going to look at different avenues for powering Redstone Arsenal and Fort Campbell, including increased use of gas.
“The most likely short-term solution is going to be gas. That’s just the reality situation,” Waksman told reporters at the time. “Gas is very cheap and plentiful, but this is part of what we have to hash out with TVA.
“There are concerns about just how much gas supply there is in local areas, so we have to work things like that out,” he added. “We have to figure out the pipeline situation and figure out all the economics of it. But I would say that that’s probably the most likely solution.”
