{"id":22605,"date":"2026-10-10T12:30:55","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T16:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=22605"},"modified":"2026-10-10T05:22:22","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T09:22:22","slug":"22-megawatt-reactors-ontario-ship-new-brunswick-army","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/22-megawatt-reactors-ontario-ship-new-brunswick-army\/","title":{"rendered":"Two 22-megawatt nuclear reactors will be built in Ontario, carried to the New Brunswick coast inside a fully assembled power plant on a heavy-lift ship and fueled only after they arrive, and the US Army has already picked a 20-megawatt version for a Kentucky base"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, we covered a nuclear power plant that’s supposed to ship to the New Brunswick coast as cargo<\/a>, built in a factory and dropped into place in one piece. Two Mi’kmaw First Nations, Pabineau and Eel River Bar, would own it, and New Brunswick’s government had already put in writing that it intends to buy whatever electricity the plant makes. It just didn’t have a reactor yet.<\/p>\n

Now it has two.<\/p>\n

On October 5, BWX Technologies announced<\/a> that Prodigy Clean Energy, the Montreal company behind the plant, and the two First Nations had picked its BANR microreactor for the Belledune project. The plan calls for two units, and the company says it’ll build them mostly at its own facilities in Ontario.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t heard of BWXT, it’s the Lynchburg, Virginia, company that builds the reactors for the Navy’s submarines and aircraft carriers. So the company isn’t exactly new to this. The BANR is, though.<\/p>\n

So what is BANR?<\/h2>\n

BANR stands for BWXT Advanced Nuclear Reactor, which is about as exciting as nuclear naming gets. It’s a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor. Most of the reactors you’ve heard of use water to carry heat away from the fuel. A gas-cooled design swaps that water for a gas. That lets the core run a lot hotter than a water-cooled plant can.<\/p>\n

The company rates each unit at 75 megawatts thermal and 22 megawatts electric. Those are two ways of measuring the same machine. A reactor makes heat first, and any plant that runs on heat loses a big chunk of it on the way to becoming electricity, so 75 megawatts in the core works out to about 22 at the generator.<\/p>\n

A BANR plant can also run as cogeneration, according to the company. That basically means sending part of the reactor’s heat straight to industrial users instead of turning all of it into electricity.<\/p>\n

The fuel is where it gets interesting. BANR runs on TRISO particles, which the Department of Energy<\/a> describes as specks of uranium fuel sealed inside a few coats of carbon and ceramic, each particle roughly as big as a poppy seed. So every particle is its own tiny containment vessel. In DOE testing, irradiated particles went through more than 300 hours at temperatures as high as 3,272 degrees Fahrenheit and came out with little or no damage.<\/p>\n

The uranium inside those particles is enriched to 19.75%, according to the company’s own spec page, against 5% or less in the reactors America runs today. Fuel in that higher band goes by HALEU, short for high-assay low-enriched uranium, and the DOE says most new reactor designs need it to pack more power into a smaller core.<\/p>\n

As for the hardware itself, I can’t find a weight or a set of dimensions for a BANR in anything BWXT has published, which is mildly annoying when you’re trying to picture one. What the company does say is that the reactor is built in modules sized to travel by truck and train under standard shipping rules, and that one reactor needs less than 5 acres of land. That’s a little under four football fields, if you count the end zones.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Per BANR reactor<\/div>\n
22 MWe<\/div>\n
From 75 megawatts of heat in the core, with four years between refuelings, per BWXT.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
At Belledune<\/div>\n
2 reactors<\/div>\n
44 MWe combined, in a plant pitched at up to 50 MWe.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Army version<\/div>\n
20 MWe<\/div>\n
Picked for Fort Campbell, Kentucky, under the Janus program.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
TARGET<\/div>\n
Belledune in service<\/div>\n
Early 2030s<\/div>\n
Prodigy puts building, shipping and installing the plant at about 18 months.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The reactors will be built in Ontario<\/h2>\n

According to the company, both reactors will be made mainly at its Ontario facilities, along with other equipment for the plant, nuclear and otherwise, with help from established suppliers and some new ones. The release doesn’t say which plant gets the job. The company’s big shop in Cambridge, Ontario, has been building the steel pressure vessel for Canada’s first small modular reactor<\/a>, so it’s a fair guess, but it’s still a guess.<\/p>\n

BWXT Canada and its sister company Kinectrics will supply the workforce, and the release credits Canada’s CANDU refurbishments and new builds with growing it. (CANDU is the homegrown reactor design behind Canada’s nuclear fleet.) Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s energy minister, gave the project his blessing in the same release.<\/p>\n

So how does a reactor get to New Brunswick?<\/h2>\n

By sea, already installed. Prodigy’s name for its product is a transportable nuclear power plant, and it’s built to hold one BANR or several. Prodigy stresses that the thing isn’t a barge with reactors parked on it. It describes a building made in a shipyard and rated to house running reactors, carried dry as cargo on a heavy-lift ship, which is basically a floating flatbed for loads too big for anything else.<\/p>\n

The plant arrives fully assembled, reactors and all. It doesn’t bring its fuel, though. Both companies say it shows up ready for fueling, so the uranium goes in at Belledune, along with the commissioning work that follows.<\/p>\n

So why not just build the whole thing in Belledune? Prodigy’s argument is that a factory and a shipyard can do this work faster and more cheaply than a construction crew on site, and it says the full cycle, from building the plant to shipping and installing it, takes about 18 months. If you’ve watched how long nuclear projects usually take, that’d be pretty quick, and it’s more or less the whole sales pitch.<\/p>\n

The Army picked the same reactor in August<\/h2>\n

If BANR sounds familiar, there’s a good chance it’s because of the Army. On August 26, BWXT said<\/a> the Army had chosen a 20-megawatt version of the reactor for Fort Campbell, which straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee line. That’s part of Janus, the same Army program that’s putting a Westinghouse microreactor at Fort Drum<\/a>. The company is aiming to break ground at Fort Campbell in late 2028 and have the reactor running in the early 2030s.<\/p>\n

So BANR’s had a pretty good six weeks for a reactor that hasn’t been built yet.<\/p>\n

So is this a done deal?<\/h2>\n

Not quite. The two companies say a definitive agreement is still in the works, one that would cover everything from engineering and licensing to the supply chain and the financing. Until that’s signed, you’re looking at a selection rather than an order, and the release’s own fine print lists getting that agreement done as one of the project’s risks.<\/p>\n

Two 22-megawatt reactors add up to 44 megawatts, by the way, and the Belledune plant has been pitched from the start at up to 50. The October 5 announcement doesn’t explain the gap. I’d read the 50 as a ceiling rather than a promise.<\/p>\n

Prodigy CEO Mathias Trojer said in the release that BANR gives the project “a credible pathway to delivering the G7’s first commercially operating Transportable Nuclear Power Plant.” The G7 bit is a fairly careful choice of words. Russia isn’t a member, and its Akademik Lomonosov, a floating plant with two reactors, has been supplying power and heat to the Arctic port of Pevek for years.<\/p>\n

Both companies are still hammering out that agreement, and as of the October 5 announcement, the Belledune plant is targeting service by the early 2030s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, we covered a nuclear power plant that’s supposed to ship to the New Brunswick coast as cargo, built … <\/p>\n

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