Military bases buy their electricity the same way you do. Same utility, same wires, same substation, same tree coming down on the same line in an ice storm. There’s a diesel generator out back for when that happens, and it works fine as long as somebody keeps the fuel deliveries coming.<\/p>\n
The Pentagon would rather not run one Indiana base that way anymore. On September 9 the Department of War announced<\/a> that Naval Weapons Station Crane, about 35 miles south of Bloomington, will get a nuclear microreactor. It’s supposed to be making power no later than September 2028, and it won’t be plugged into the commercial grid at all.<\/p>\n A microreactor isn’t a power plant in the way you’re probably picturing one. You don’t get a cooling tower, and you don’t get a turbine hall the size of a cathedral. These are factory-built machines that ship on a truck or inside a container and put out anywhere from a few hundred kilowatts to a few megawatts, which covers a base’s critical loads rather than a city.<\/p>\n The other odd part is who owns it. The Navy isn’t buying this reactor. A private company builds it, owns it, runs it and sells the power across the fence, which is closer to how your landlord owns the boiler than to how the military usually buys hardware.<\/p>\n Not exactly, and the official wording is careful about it. The release calls it the Navy’s \u201cfirst shore-based advanced microreactor,\u201d and the word advanced is doing real work in that sentence.<\/p>\n Sailors have been training on a land-based reactor in upstate New York for decades. The S8G prototype at the Kesselring Site in West Milton is a submarine propulsion plant bolted to the ground in Saratoga County, and it’s still running.<\/p>\n The Navy also ran a power reactor at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, a 1.8-megawatt unit the crews nicknamed Nukey Poo. The Navy took over full operation of it in 1964 and shut it down in September 1972 after 438 malfunctions and an availability rate of about 72 percent. That’s a bad run by any standard. Crews then dug up the contaminated soil underneath it and shipped it back to the United States.<\/p>\n I’d argue that’s the more useful precedent here, and not in the way you’d expect. The machine that flopped in Antarctica was 1960s technology run by a 25-man crew in the worst environment on the planet. Southern Indiana is a considerably easier assignment.<\/p>\n In May 2025 the White House signed an executive order<\/a> telling the Pentagon, through the Secretary of the Army, to start operating an Army-regulated nuclear reactor at a domestic military base no later than September 30, 2028. The Army set up the Janus Program<\/a> that October to make it happen.<\/p>\n Crane got picked because Crane could hit the date. Michael Dodd, assistant secretary of war for critical technologies, told reporters at a defense conference the same day, in remarks reported by Breaking Defense, that \u201ctime had priority for us\u201d in site selection, and that the question was less about hooking a reactor up to an AI data center or a laser than about where the timeline could actually be met. He also called the timelines aggressive, which is an unusually honest thing for an official to say about his own program.<\/p>\n Two years is aggressive. Nuclear projects in this country are usually measured in decades, and the last big one Indiana attempted, the Marble Hill plant, got abandoned after $2.5 billion went into it and never produced a watt.<\/p>\n Nobody has said, because nobody has picked yet.<\/p>\n In August the Army selected five reactor developers under Janus, splitting $2.2 billion between Antares Nuclear, BWXT Advanced Technologies, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems, Radiant Industries and Westinghouse Government Services, each one paired with a different installation. A defense official told the American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear News that Crane’s reactor will come from one of those five and that the name will be announced later. Dodd, on the other hand, told reporters the department hadn’t released its solicitation or started any kind of source selection.<\/p>\n Those two statements don’t fit together especially well, and I can’t reconcile them for you. What I can tell you is that the department hasn’t put a megawatt figure, a cost or a construction schedule on Crane yet.<\/p>\n That’s the second first in this announcement, and it holds up. The only reactor operating in Indiana right now is PUR-1, a 12-kilowatt teaching machine three floors under a building at Purdue, and the state has never generated electricity from nuclear power. So the Crane unit, whatever it turns out to be, would be the first.<\/p>\n The base itself is a strange place for a state milestone. Crane covers about 62,000 acres of southern Indiana, it’s the third largest naval installation in the world, and it holds roughly a quarter of the military’s joint conventional munitions. It used to be called Naval Support Activity Crane. The rename to Naval Weapons Station Crane tells you what the Navy thinks the place is for.<\/p>\n There’s one local loose end. Martin County’s emergency management director, Andy Reingold, told Indiana Public Media that the county hasn’t received any plans for responding to an emergency involving the reactor. That’s not a scandal at this stage, since the design and the operator haven’t been chosen yet. It’s still the kind of thing a county would rather sort out early.<\/p>\n If you want a sense of what might show up at Crane, two of the five Janus companies have machines you can already look at. Radiant trucked its 1-megawatt Kaleidos reactor<\/a> from El Segundo to Idaho last month for testing, and Westinghouse has been running its eVinci test reactor at temperature in Nevada<\/a>. Neither machine is powering anything outside a test program yet.<\/p>\n The Department of War says the reactor still has to clear safety, environmental and regulatory reviews, and that the company will be named later. The date in the executive order doesn’t move: September 30, 2028.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Military bases buy their electricity the same way you do. Same utility, same wires, same substation, same tree coming down … <\/p>\nSo is this the Navy’s first reactor on land?<\/h2>\n
The deadline picked the base<\/h2>\n
So who’s actually building the thing?<\/h2>\n
Indiana has never had a power reactor<\/h2>\n