It turns out (see below for one source) that the U.S. Government is "investing" billions of dollars in the future of inefficient, expensive, unreliable, complex, impossible to dispose of, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). The real question is: WHY???
Face it: The reason has to be something sinister — it just has to be. Nuclear power always has a dark side (recall "Atoms for Peace" was just a cover to get the public to accept atoms for war (nuclear weapons)).
It turns out, it is sinister. Very sinister.
The United States military — currently run by the craziest, laziest, most ignorant ignoramus ever to lead an army — wants Small Modular Reactors. Specifically five of them, to be operating by 2028 (a date undoubtedly picked for political reasons). All five will be located on military bases in America.
How best to describe this? How about: One of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb nuclear ideas! (And that's saying a lot.)
Meanwhile, dozens of senior military career officers are being unceremoniously fired by the ignoramus. Might this have been one of many things they knew was a bad idea? One would hope so...
At the moment, the "new, tougher, high-test[osterone] army" is "investing" $2.2 BILLION smackeroos (your tax dollars) to get its hands on these five SMRs. And they're to be mobile, as in mobile-Chernobyls (to recoin a phrase from yesteryear's nuclear waste transport plans to ship thousands of highly radioactive used reactor cores to Yucca Mountain, Nevada — which is technically still on the books as the ONLY solution to nuclear waste, even though it's cancelled AND was unworkable to begin with, when it was first proposed about half a century ago.
But the really crazy part is how vulnerable a nuclear reactor would be if it was deployed during a modern war. Think drone swarms, gravity bombs, unmanned tanks, robot soldiers that can outrun a horse, saboteurs, and general mayhem.
The plan, obviously, it to provide power to the fighting forces. So let's looks at that for a moment (which is more than enough time to see how stupid it is):
A typical SMR is expected to produce several hundred megawatts of electricity (roughly a third as much as a "modern" full-scale nuclear reactor (designed in the 1960s and 70s)). These five are called "Microreactors" and range from just one megawatt to twenty megawatts of power.
What would an army need these for? In an emergency would it feed into the civilian grid? (Not likely!) The bases would all still be connected to the local grid, though. Backup power for them, not for us. But of course, it's just a test. They want to take them into battle. Seriously!
To charge their phones? To charge their drones? To charge their robots, unmanned tanks, and the night-lights in their mobile bathrooms?
ALl of that, perhaps, but mainly, it's assumed, to power their own Data Center, which would also have to be mobile, and would also be a target. Data Centers are already targets during war, and — as with power — distributed data is the most resilient. What will the troops (or the robots) do when their Data Center is blown up (or its power source is disabled, or both, or the connections between the soldier (or robot) in the field and the Date Center are cut)?
One central power unit for what, several thousand troops? That's a target right there — and a rather easy-to-find one, at that! Despite shielding, any operating reactor is constantly emitting large quantities of high-energy rays and particles that are detectable with all sorts of "high-tech" equipment (they would be detectable with your phone if the phone manufacturers felt like adding a micro-sized radiation detector (which would barely raise the price and could provide a much-needed service in an emergency (I'm sure Herman Kahn would have approved!).
Besides that, mobile Data Centers would either be emitting radio-frequency communications to soldiers, robots or drones, or would have fiber-optic or other direct connections. Both Mobile SMRs and Data Centers would, in short, be high-value targets that are easy to find and difficult or impossible to protect.
The following corporations have all finalized contracts with the military to place nuclear reactors on five bases:
Antares Nuclear, Inc. – Deploying at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
BWXT Advanced Technologies, LLC – Deploying at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems – Deploying at Fort Hood, Texas.
Radiant Industries, Inc. – Deploying at Fort Benning, Georgia (under a $750 million slice of the program).
Westinghouse Government Services – Deploying at Fort Drum, New York.
The claimed benefit? Resilient, localized backup.
At military bases in America!!! You would think (and Herman Kahn would certainly agree) that making the ENTIRE US GRID resilient would be a FAR BETTER choice for America — both for "defense" purposes as well as for the well-being of our citizens — and our soldiers.
However, these "microreactors" are supposed to be "mobile" reactors, and they're supposed to be deployed — it's MANDATED to have them OPERATIONAL by September, 2028! As if mandating it can FORCE it to happen. It's August, 2026 already, that's one heck of a time-frame to do the impossible — make a SAFE, RELIABLE nuclear reactor. It's not going to happen. They might build these "test" reactors, but they won't be safe or reliable. They might appear to be sort of reliable in peace, but during war they're vulnerable. And when one fails — even the smallest is expected to be large enough to power 1,000 typical U.S. homes, and most of them could power tens of thousands of homes. When that fails, due to the conditions of war, what's an army to do?
In America (if the fighting were on the home turf) the answer should be simple and obvious: plug into the resilient, reliable, civilian power grid (like they do now). Which would be virtually 100% reliable EVEN DURING WAR if it were powered by small-scale renewable energy.
Wind, wave, solar... with energy-dense batteries for backup.
Could you win a war that way? You can't win it with nuclear, that's for sure, because the "mobile" SMRs wouldn't be very mobile during a war: In all likelihood they would have to be shut down, cooled down, partially dismantled, transported (in pieces), and then re-assembled... while under fire and easy detection by the enemy.
Being on foreign soil isn't any better, since the attack could come from all sides — unless we're fighting together with allies, but we seem to have lost all of those, thanks to actions by the current Administration, such as threatening Greenland, NATO, Canada and even Switzerland, all in the last year, while senselessly and ruthlessly attacking smaller and weaker countries out of pure vanity, whilst committing war crimes all the while. This is not a recipe for peace in the world.
Whenever a nuclear reactor is available as a target for the enemy (see Bennett Ramberg's book on the subject) it must be protected. Nuclear reactors in America are — by law — at least minimally protected with armed guards, guard towers, high fences, lines-of-sight carefully thought out (not much use nowadays what with drone swarms the most likely attack vector)...
(Nuclear spent fuel, which is even more dangerous in many cases because there's so much of it in one place, isn't nearly as well guarded/protected, but harder to attack, thankfully. (Not hard enough to prevent it being a target in a thermonuclear war, for example, or by any terrorist hell-bent on destroying an entire state.)
Reactors being used in war are especially vulnerable targets. Disable ONE nuclear aircraft carrier and you put an entire air wing of our Navy out of action, perhaps sinking the carrier along with poisoning and drowning its crew. And you can do this from hundreds of miles away, if you've got a good "gravity bomb", which are nearly impossible to defend against (or if a friend of yours can give you one for a special occasion). One gravity bomb, well-aimed. And targeting is getting better all the time, all over the world.
Nuclear reactors are a waste of military money. The $2.2 Billion could be used for life-saving vaccines and aid to climate-stricken areas, of course — or it could be used to strengthen the civilian grid near each of the five chosen bases, which would be the BEST way to make the base's energy system RELIABLE EVEN IN TIME OF WAR, and the cheapest as well, for that matter. Or it could be used to install MOBILE solar and wind and non-lithium battery backups, easily carrying enough power to fight a modern war, which are only expected to last a few days (see Herman Kahn again, or listen to the current abomination in the White House, who announced he had "won" a war in three days that is still going on nearly six months later).
Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
###
Note: Nuclear expert Marvin Resnikoff commented on these reactors recently: "It is more than radioactive waste that is involved. SMR's require highly enriched uranium to operate for 8 years or more without refueling. To operate, reactors require water or sodium. To produce electricity, either PWR's or BWR's, require water as steam to turn a turbine."
The above essay was NOT written with AI (it went through about a dozen human edit passes by two humans instead) but is based on this google AI-based email that was passed around this morning:
https://share.google/aimode/tcH1Jn1mtik2a3Ix3
The U.S. Army is investing up to $2.2 billion over five years to deploy more than 20 commercial nuclear microreactors at domestic military installations. Announced under the Janus Program, this milestone-based initiative partners with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to decouple critical defense infrastructure from potentially vulnerable civilian electrical grids. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Selected Companies and Military Bases
The Army has finalized contracts with five private vendors to build, own, and operate these systems at five initial base locations: [2, 5]
Antares Nuclear, Inc. – Deploying at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
BWXT Advanced Technologies, LLC – Deploying at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems – Deploying at Fort Hood, Texas.
Radiant Industries, Inc. – Deploying at Fort Benning, Georgia (under a $750 million slice of the program).
Westinghouse Government Services – Deploying at Fort Drum, New York. [6, 7]
Key Specifications of the Microreactors
Power Output: Each microreactor will generate between 1 and 20 megawatts of electricity, roughly enough to sustain a small town. [7, 8]
Grid Independence: The systems will operate on a "private wire" configuration. Bases remain connected to civilian grids, but microreactors act as a resilient, localized backup. [7, 9]
Mobility: Unlike massive conventional nuclear facilities, these factory-built modules are compact enough to be transported via truck, rail, or heavy cargo aircraft. [10, 11]
Timeline: Driven by Executive Order 14299, the Pentagon is legally mandated to have an operational nuclear reactor on a domestic military installation by September 30, 2028. [9, 12]
Why the Military is Going Nuclear
The military wants to replace its reliance on diesel backup generators, which present a logistically vulnerable fuel supply chain during conflicts. Advanced microreactors can operate for years without refueling, providing consistent baseload power capable of running energy-intensive, next-generation weapons systems and command centers. [4, 7, 13]
Furthermore, the U.S. Department of the Army intends for the Janus Program to serve as the "spear tip" for the commercial energy industry. By absorbing the initial financial and regulatory risks, the military is helping private developers scale up mass manufacturing to pave the way for civilian commercial use. [3, 7, 14, 15]
Are you tracking this deployment for its implications on defense technology, or are you more interested in how it affects the broader commercial nuclear energy sector?
[1] https://abcnews.com
[2] https://www.powermag.com
[3] https://www.army.mil
[4] https://www.houstonchronicle.com
[5] https://defensescoop.com
[6] https://www.defenseone.com
[7] https://www.krqe.com
[8] https://www.wsj.com
[9] https://neutronbytes.com
[10] https://www.nytimes.com
[11] https://www.armytimes.com
[12] https://www.bwxt.com
[13] https://www.reuters.com
[14] https://energy.media
[15] https://www.cnbc.com
Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download:
acehoffman.org
Blog:
acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube:
youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at]
acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner,
The Animated Software Company
