The Army announced Wednesday that its Janus Program has selected five companies to build nuclear microreactors at five military installations, committing up to $2.2 billion to an effort that could eventually put more than 20 reactors across War Department facilities.
It is the latest evidence that President Donald Trump’s revival of American nuclear power could become the most consequential legacy of his second administration.
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Janus grew directly from Trump’s May 2025 executive order directing the military to operate an Army-regulated advanced reactor at a domestic installation by Sept. 30, 2028. The Army launched Janus in October 2025, a step we approved of at the time, and this week paired Antares Nuclear with Fort Bragg, BWXT with Fort Campbell, General Atomics with Fort Hood, Radiant Industries with Fort Benning, and Westinghouse with Fort Drum. The reactors will be contractor-owned and operated, with federal payments tied to achieving certain technical milestones.
The goal of Janus is bigger than simply keeping the lights on at Army bases. Modern military installations depend on vulnerable civilian grids while weapons systems, computing, communications, and artificial intelligence require ever more electricity. Microreactors can provide reliable baseload power independent of those sources. The first Janus reactor is targeted to begin operating by September 2028.
Just as important, the Army wants to help create a commercial nuclear industry. It says Janus will succeed only when several companies have developed reliable, affordable microreactors they can sell to customers beyond the military.
There is ample precedent. The Pentagon has repeatedly helped young technologies cross the gap from expensive experiments to mass-market products. The Pentagon and NASA were virtually the only buyers of the first integrated circuits, and Minuteman missile procurement helped scale the semiconductor industry. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency backed pioneering satellite programs, including Transit, while its Advanced Research Projects Agency Network research became the foundation of the internet. Military demand can provide what new technologies often need most: a reliable first customer willing to pay for performance until production scales and costs fall.
Trump is applying the same model to nuclear power.
On May 23, 2025, he ordered the Energy Department to create a pilot pathway for advanced reactors outside the national laboratories and set an audacious goal of getting at least three reactors to criticality by July 4, 2026. The DOE launched the program weeks later, establishing an expedited approval process and a hard deadline that turned reactor testing into a sprint. The program did not merely meet Trump’s deadline. It beat it.
Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 went critical on June 4, Valar Atomics’s Ward 250 followed on June 18, Deployable Energy’s Unity followed on June 30, and Aalo Atomics made it four on July 4 — all steps we celebrated at the time.
These were mostly zero-power demonstrations, not commercial plants, but that is precisely why the next step matters. Valar has already produced a small amount of electricity from Ward 250, generating about 10 kilowatts in July. Antares expects a full-power electricity-producing reactor in 2027. Deployable Energy is targeting a full-power Unity demonstration in 2027. Aalo says its follow-on 10-megawatt Aalo-X plant will power an Idaho data center in 2027.
America needs this speed. China now has roughly half of all nuclear capacity under construction worldwide, while the International Energy Agency expects almost 30 gigawatts of new Chinese nuclear capacity to come online by 2030. At the same time, the artificial intelligence race is becoming an electricity race. Data centers, chip factories, military bases, and advanced manufacturing all need huge amounts of dependable power.
CLOSING THE TOURIST VISA LOOPHOLE
Trump rightly made securing the southern border a defining priority, and restoring control there will be an important legacy. But borders can be reopened by a future president. Rebuilding an American nuclear industrial base could reshape the country’s economy and national security for generations.
If Trump leaves office with America once again able to design, manufacture, deploy, and export nuclear reactors at scale, the nuclear renaissance may prove to be his greatest legacy.
