The US Army will award five selected companies up to USD 2.2 billion over five years to own, build, and operate microreactors at military bases, conditional on meeting performance milestones along the way, according to Power Engineering Nuclear.
The program is sized well beyond a single demonstration. The Army expects more than 20 nuclear microreactors to be built and operated under it, Power Engineering Nuclear reported.
Unit size varies by vendor. Each reactor will deliver between 1 MW and 20 MW, depending on the company's design.
One siting decision is already public: eVinci microreactors from Westinghouse were selected for deployment at Fort Drum in New York, according to Power Engineering Nuclear.
The schedule is fixed by an external directive. The Army was tasked with ensuring an advanced reactor starts operating at a domestic military installation no later than Sept. 30, 2028.
The regulatory route sets this apart from commercial projects. Power Engineering Nuclear reported that the reactors will be licensed by the Army rather than the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the body that licenses commercial nuclear reactors. That places design review, siting approval, and operating authority inside the service rather than with the civilian regulator, and it removes the commercial licensing queue from the critical path to the 2028 operating date.
The payment structure matters for the vendors. The USD 2.2 billion figure is a ceiling tied to milestones, not a lump-sum contract value, and the companies carry ownership and operating responsibility for the units they build.
At the low end of the stated range, a single 1 MW unit serves a load closer to a large building than a base; at 20 MW, one reactor covers a substantial share of an installation's demand. With more than 20 units expected across the program, the fleet approach spreads deployment risk across multiple designs and multiple sites rather than concentrating it in one first-of-a-kind build.