Pentagon Selects Indiana Navy Base to Host Nuclear Microreactor

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon announced Wednesday that it has selected the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indiana as the site for a next-generation nuclear reactor. According to a senior defense official, the decision was primarily driven by the need to meet President Donald Trump’s ambitious deadline to deploy a first reactor on a military base “no later than September 30, 2028.”

“Time had priority for us… when looking at site selection,” Michael Dodd, assistant secretary of defense for critical technologies, told reporters Wednesday afternoon. “The site selection was less about whether we would connect it to an AI data center, a directed energy system, or critical infrastructure, and more about where we could actually meet those timelines.”

“The timelines are aggressive, to put it mildly,” he said on the sidelines of the NDIA Emerging Technologies Conference on Wednesday. “We needed a delegation that was going to lean forward and work with us very collaboratively in order to do that. Indiana and the governor and our delegation were just tremendous.” (Gov. Mike Braun, both Senators, and all seven House members are Republicans.)

In the drive to deliver on the deadline, some major technical issues remain to be determined, Dodd acknowledged.

“You may be getting a little bit in front of where we are in the process,” Dodd told reporters when pressed for specifics on the advanced design. “We have not yet released the Commercial Solutions Opening” — a form of streamlined government solicitation — “or begun any sort of source selection or down-selection.”

“Our announcement today is really first and foremost that we’re going to meet the president’s executive order [deadline],” Dodd said. “But the performers therein have not yet identified their systems, all the redundancies and safety and security measures that will be part of how we select and ultimately deploy those systems.”

That said, Dodd emphasized that the Army’s JANUS program, which is leading the military’s nuclear power initiative, is “well underway…identifying different systems and performers that meet the program requirements.”

In August, JANUS awarded five companies a total of $2.2 billion to build prototypes. Army official Jeff Waksman acknowledged significant unknowns, from regulatory challenges to technical questions surrounding safety, security, and nuclear waste disposal.

Speaking a day later at the same NDIA conference, Pentagon CTO Emil Michael called the program the leading edge of “a renaissance in nuclear technology” that will accompany “an explosion in the abundance of energy.”

Afterward, Michael told reporters he was confident that previous Pentagon efforts had positioned the program for success in meeting the president’s deadline. “We know from an R&D standpoint where these companies are in terms of their ability to deliver an SMR [Small Modular Reactor],” he said. “We think we’re going to get there by ’28.”

Just securing agreement on a site is a major achievement, Michael argued, after decades of stalled nuclear power projects across the United States.

“This is not a simple thing,” Michael told reporters. “In this country, we have made it difficult to build a nuclear reactor… You have to get regulatory approval for those things, and that has not been an easy process in this country.”

Going from last May’s Executive Order to this week’s site selection constitutes “good progress,” he said.

As for the safety concerns that have long hampered nuclear power projects in the U.S. since the Three Mile Island accident — which resulted in zero deaths and no clear evidence of increased cancer rates — Michael argued those fears were overblown even for older reactors, let alone the advanced designs under consideration for Crane.

“We know it’s clean, and we know it’s safe, and we know it can be made safer,” he told reporters. Meanwhile, he noted, demand for electrical power is rising rapidly in both the civilian and military sectors, largely due to AI and the massive data centers required to support it.

“You’re having this explosion of data centers,” Michael said. “I call them ‘combat compute commands,'” he added, given how increasingly critical they are for day-to-day Defense Department operations.

That does not mean the military plans to place the new microreactors on forward bases within range of enemy strikes, Michael told reporters. “We have a hundred other means of efficient and clean energy before you get to active battle zones,” he said.

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