Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, on stage at center, and Secretary of the Department of Energy Chris Wright, right, speak at the annual Association of the U.S. Army convention in Washington on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)

WASHINGTON — The Army will place commercial nuclear microreactors on some of its bases in the coming years under a private-public partnership it has dubbed the Janus Program, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll announced Tuesday.

The program — named for the Roman god of transition — seeks to bolster the Army’s ability to power its bases as the service anticipates expending drastically more energy in the coming years as it increasingly adopts artificial intelligence capabilities and new-age weaponry, officials said.

“We’re going to need to be able to access power like we have never needed it before,” Driscoll said at the annual Association of the U.S. Army convention in Washington. “If you think about our depots and our arsenals and our bases in this country and around the world, we have incredible space, [and] we have incredibly talented soldiers who want to partner with industry, who want to invite them onto our land to help us solve this incredibly difficult problem … on helping to grow the micro-nuclear reactor space that is something that will benefit the United States Army, but also the country as a whole.”

Officials envision the first microreactors being in place by 2028. They will be owned and operated by the commercial companies that supply them but with Army oversight. The service has not selected which of its installations will receive the nuclear power sources, officials said Tuesday.

Microreactors are nuclear reactors about 100 to 1,000 times smaller than conventional nuclear reactors, some of which can be small enough to be transported on a semi-truck’s tractor-trailer, according to the Idaho National Laboratory, which oversees much of the Department of Energy’s nuclear power research. The reactors can produce up to 50 megawatts of power and can function entirely independently of the traditional electric grid, according to the laboratory.

Pentagon officials have been considering building nuclear microreactors on military installations for several years. Driscoll said the Army, with help from the Energy Department, will move forward with those plans.

The announcement also comes after President Donald Trump in May issued an executive order directing the Army to establish a program for “the utilization of nuclear energy for both installation energy and operational energy” on military posts by the end of 2028. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the Idaho National Laboratory will begin testing “next generation, small modular reactors” by next summer and plans to have “10 to 12 of them operating in the next couple of years.”

Nuclear power, Wright said, provides a number of advantages over traditional power sources. Nuclear reactors work constantly and can last decades without refueling. They also continue running even if there are problems with the national power grid, like in the case of an enemy attack.

“This is an energy source that’s dense,” Wright said. “It works 24/7 whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, it’s got so much upside from innovation, but politics and fear just smothered the industry in the last few decades.”

The Army plans to open a competition among commercial companies to supply two microreactors for up to nine Army installations in the continental United States, said Jeff Waksman, Driscoll’s top adviser on installation and energy issues. He said it was too early to estimate how much the program would cost, but cost efficiency was the Army’s second priority after safety.

Waksman said local communities will be involved in the project, and they could potentially benefit from Army nuclear reactors by receiving some of the energy they produce. He also said the Army would not place microreactors on any installations where nearby communities object to them.

“We’re not here to impose on any local communities,” he said.

For now, Waksman said the microreactors would be stationary platforms used only for local power production.

But there are potential tactical applications for microreactors down the road, he said.

Wright said he envisions a future where nuclear microreactors could power the small bases where front-line U.S. military forces work in wartime — like the forward operating bases and observation posts troops lived on during the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which typically ran on diesel generators.

“Ultimately, and not in the too far future, you’ll be able to place a reactor at a forward deployed place, multiple megawatts of power,” Wright said. “So meaningful power to do what you’re doing, and it’ll run for years, potentially decades, without any refueling or any servicing. That is just game changing for remote military assets.”

He compared it to how the U.S. Navy powers its nuclear submarines.

“It changed the game for our Navy, and I think we can do the same thing with our Army,” Wright said.