By the end of this decade, the Air Force could begin equipping up to nine bases with self-sufficient nuclear microreactors as part of an effort to unplug from local commercial power grids and satisfy a growing demand for secure, reliable power sources that are more protected from cyberattacks and natural disasters.
One is set to be at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, as part of a project that was delayed 18 months from bid protests of the service’s selection process. Despite the setback, the Air Force hopes to announce a commercial firm to build the microreactor this year.
The rest of the microreactors will come from the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations program, known as ANPI, a Defense Innovation Unit effort launched last year with the Air Force and the Army. The DIU program recently selected eight commercial firms that will be eligible for contracts to build microreactors on select installations to meet the need for independent power sources.
“We have growing critical-mission need areas in both the Air Force and on the Space Force … we have our own data centers, so think about [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] feed, downlink stations from satellites– so we need to make sure that we’re able to support artificial intelligence for doing our own intelligence review,” Nancy Balkus, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for Infrastructure, Energy and Environment, told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Balkus added that nuclear power will allow these installations to “operate independently from the commercial grid. … So when there is some type of an impact, whether it’s a natural disaster, just a severe weather event, or cyber attack–which we’ve already seen multiple times in control systems for utility systems–we want to make sure that we have a resilient energy solution that offers security from all of those things.”
If all goes well, the Air Force will build a 5-megawatt microreactor at Eielson that will supplement its 15-megawatt coal plant before 2030, Balkus said, explaining that after a series of protests, Defense Logistics Agency Energy—the agency overseeing the Air Force project—has been able to remediate the acquisition strategy.
“I’m anticipating that we will be able to make an announcement, perhaps as early as this summer, but maybe later this year,” said Balkus, who is unsure whether the project can recover from the 18-month delay and still meet the 2027 completion deadline outlined in the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.
“I’m hoping that our Eielson reactor will be [completed] before 2030,” she said.
DIU’s Director of Energy Andrew Higier had a slightly longer timeline, saying he is confident that the commercial microreactor industry has matured enough to begin delivering safe, government licensed microreactor prototypes for the ANPI project by “the early 2030s.”
“If you would have asked me three years ago, I probably would have said, we won’t do a nuclear project, but now here we are, and that’s because that commercial sector has grown,” he said.
Commercial companies have recognized that the surge in demand for artificial intelligence will require power generated by microreactor technology, Higier said.
“There are now private sector companies, some of the big name ones … the Googles and Metas of the world that are looking to leverage micro and small reactors for their data centers,” he said. “The reality is now there’s a large private sector capital investment being poured into this technology. There’s no longer just a defense need for this.”
Higier added that commercial microreactors of the scale and size needed for DIU’s program do not yet exist, “so I think in this particular instance, we are actually looking to help catalyze the industry, as opposed to just directly leveraging the industry.”
In early April, DIU selected the following eight firms to be eligible for prototyping contracts under the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations effort:
- Antares Nuclear Inc.
- BWXT Advanced Technologies LLC
- General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems
- Kairos Power LLC
- Oklo Inc.
- Radiant Industries Incorporated
- Westinghouse Government Services
- X-Energy LLC
The Air Force and DLA Energy originally intended to award the Eielson contract to Oklo, before rescinding that notice of intent after a protest. Radiant and Westinghouse had also presented proposals.
Higier said the next step will involve sending request for prototype proposals to these firms, most likely before fiscal 2025 ends in September.
While he would not discuss specifics of source selection, Higier then said the effort will go into a “crawl, walk, run” approach.
“We will approach this carefully and deliberately with milestones in the contracts that get us our best chance of success,” he said.
Part of that approach will be reducing the risks associated with this type of nuclear power as much as possible, Balkus said.
“There are risks with any new technology. … However, I think the benefits outweigh any risks that there are. And let’s be clear up front, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing process looks at every single angle of every risk area that there is with the safety of the reactor portion, as well as the environmental impact of putting a microreactor” on a base,” Balkus said.
The reactor designs for this effort come from proven reactor technology that is “intrinsically safe,” said Kirk Phillips, director of the Air Force Office of Energy Assurance.
“One of the things we also really like is that they do have a significant amount of shielding and protection that is part of the design,” Phillips said. “It’s greatly dependent on the specific vendor and their designs, but those things make them easily hardenable from an external attack, so more than just risk or contamination, we also need it to survive and do its job.”
Air Force officials said it is too early to discuss which bases will be selected as sites for future microreactors. Under a process dubbed Department of Defense Advanced Reactor Criteria Baseline Understanding for Enterprise Scaling, or DARC BlUES, Air Force officials will examine the needs of both the Air Force and Space Force to make its selections.
“We want to have a data-driven, decision-making method to be able to identify what are the best installations that have the most critical mission areas that would benefit most from the benefits of advanced nuclear energy,” Balkus said “What is the mission criticality? How can we get it to [be] cost-effective, because while there are many benefits to nuclear, we wouldn’t want to pursue a nuclear solution if there was a more cost-effective energy solution other than nuclear.”
There are states such as Alaska and Texas that have “passed nuclear-friendly laws” that will influence the selection process, Balkus siad.
“That’s a really important factor too, because if the state and local regulatory laws are not supportive, then that’s a factor we also want to consider,” she said.
The Air Force is also in the process of determining how many bases will be involved in the effort, a decision that will also depend on available funding sources, Balkus said.
“We are developing a [list] so that depending on site-specific criteria and funding to be able to implement them–whether it’s DOD funding or whether it’s private capital funding–will determine how many locations we would implement,” she said.
While these will be prototyping contracts and not production ones, Higier said he is confident the effort could yield multiple microreactor prototypes for the Air Force as well as the Army.
“Within the bounds of the prototype contract, we are not really very limited. In other words, there’s quite a bit of room here for the Army to get what they want, the Air Force to get what they want,” he said, explaining that it’s possible that each vendor could do “at least one or two sites.”
“If the Army wants those eight vendors … and the Air Force wants those eight vendors, and they want different sites, that’s going to be OK.”