Antares starts a national-security chain reaction
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Antares' advanced reactor, Mark-0, hit criticality this month at Idaho National Laboratory, meaning it reached a self-sustaining chain reaction.
- Another chain reaction within the national security community quickly followed.
Why it matters: Today's battlefields and bases are rife with energy hogs. Drone batteries need charging; computers and servers and networks and radars need to stay online.
- Now imagine tomorrow.
- Nuclear power of all shapes and sizes could ease the burden.
Driving the news: Antares was the first of 10 companies tapped for the Energy Department's Reactor Pilot Program to run through the tape. (Valar Atomics, another entrant, in February had a reactor airlifted on C-17s.)
- "We're months to years out from being able to start deploying this technology to military installations," CEO Jordan Bramble told reporters.
- "Thousands and thousands of assets here in the U.S., on military installations, need resilient power," he added. "Couple that with the fact that we now have an adversary that's actually capable of disrupting the civilian grid."
State of play: Both the Army and Air Force have expressed significant interest in nuclear power, with their respective Janus and Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations initiatives.
- The Air Force this year paired Antares with Joint Base San Antonio in Texas. ANPI seeks to have at least one reactor running on at least one installation by 2030.
- "There is no better high-energy-density source that can keep the lights on on a bad day for a long time," Rian Bahran, the deputy assistant secretary of energy for nuclear reactors, told reporters.
- Diesel generators, a mainstay of U.S. power projection, "can get you weeks to months," Bahran said. With a micro-reactor, it's "years without the need to refuel."
Zoom in: BWX Technologies' tri-structural isotropic fuel, or TRISO, powered the Antares reactor. Enough was made to power multiple reactors in the future, according to Bramble.
- BWXT is also deeply involved in Project Pele, a mobile nuclear reactor championed by the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office.
The bottom line: "I think June 4 will be a historic day in the American nuclear renaissance," Energy Secretary Chris Wright told reporters. "The team at Antares and their partners in the DOE have shown America can do bold things."
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