The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has chosen two companies to proceed with the development of small, portable nuclear reactors for military use in the field.
     BWXT Advanced Technologies and X-energy were chosen by the Strategic Capability Office (SCO) to continue with Project Pele. This project seeks to develop a nuclear fission reactor in the one to five megawatt output range that can operate within three days of delivery and be safety removed in as few as seven days if this is needed.
     The two companies, along with Westinghouse Government Services, were each given preliminary contracts of less than fifteen million dollars in March of 2020 to begin the design of the new reactors. The final design is due to be delivered to the SCO in 2022. At that point, the DoD will make a decision on whether to move forward with the creations of prototypes which can be tested.
    Jeff Waksman is the program manager for Project Pele. He issued a statement that said, “We are thrilled with the progress our industrial partners have made on their designs. We are confident that by early 2022 we will have two engineering designs matured to a sufficient state that we will be able to determine suitability for possible construction and testing.”
      The DoD has been long been interested nuclear power as a potential way to reduce energy costs and also reduce vulnerability due to dependence on local energy grids. According to a recent press release, the DoD uses approximately 30 Terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons of fuel per day.”
      According to an October 2018 technical report issued by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), ninety percent of military installations have “an average annual energy use that can be met by an installed capacity of nuclear power” of about forty megawatts of electricity or less.
     The new Biden administration is expected to pursue alternative energy options across the DoD. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is pledging to lower the department’s carbon footprint. Consideration of the impact of climate change will be included in strategic decisions. The question of whether nuclear energy will provide a way forward or not may, in the end, depend on whether the taboo around nuclear power can be assuaged for local defense communities and members of Congress.
     Project Pele is not the only attempt to introduce small nuclear reactors to the DoD inventory. There is a second effort that is being managed through the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (USDAS). That project was ordered in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. It involves a pilot program aimed at demonstrating the efficacy of a small nuclear reactor in the two to ten megawatt range. It will undergo initial testing at a Department of Energy site around 2023.
     While Project Pele is focused on the potential for deployable reactors, the acquisition and sustainment effort is focused on domestic military installations. The goal of the acquisition and sustainment effort is to have an operational system by 2027.