Almost a year after the Janus program was announced in October 2025, the United States Army selected five nuclear companies and awarded a collective of $2.2 billion to them to build over 20 microreactors across several military installations.
According to the Army’s Wednesday press release, the five companies are Antares Nuclear, BWX Technologies, General Atomics, Radiant Nuclear and Westinghouse. Antares is slated to build at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, BWXT at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, General Atomics at Fort Hood in Texas, Radiant at Fort Benning in Georgia and Westinghouse at Fort Drum in New York.
In a media briefing call attended by Exchange Monitor, an Army spokesperson said the Army will follow a similar regulatory process to the commercial industry.
“All the environmental rules that would apply to nuclear reactors in the commercial sphere would also apply here. You know the regulatory process because it’s going to be an Army regulatory process as opposed to DOE or NRC,” the spokesperson said. “But we are working with DOE and NRC to try to do the best that we can to align our regulatory processes as much as possible to have as similar standards as possible, so that these companies can have a straight line from Army approval to hopefully NRC approval soon after.”
The Army said the companies will receive government funding through a milestone-based payment method where they would have to hit technical goals in order to receive the appropriations. This methodology for the $2.2 billion funds will be conducted over the course of fiscal years 2027 through 2031.
Among the selected companies, Radiant will be awarded $750 million to build up to 15 Kaleidos microreactors, making it the largest contract provided under the Janus program, Radiant said in its Wednesday press release. Radiant is developing a one-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled microreactor that will be powered by tristructural isotropic, commonly known as TRISO fuel.
“Since launching the Janus Program, our mandate from President Trump and Secretary Hegseth has been clear: secure the power our warfighters need to train, deploy and win,” Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll said in the Army’s release. “Awarding these contracts accelerates our ability to deliver safe, reliable baseload power directly to our installations. We are building the energy resilience necessary to project combat power globally, without relying on potentially vulnerable external grids.”
The Janus program aims to move the military towards using commercial nuclear power systems to bring energy security at its military installations. Janus builds off previous efforts and lessons from Project Pele, a DOE demonstration microreactor that is planned to produce for the DoD by 2028.
The Army said that selections for the program were made by a board of nuclear and technical experts from the Department of Energy, its national laboratories and officials from across the military services. The Army spokesperson also said on the call the five companies will all be delivering their waste to a single Department of Energy site.
Three of the Janus program recipients – Antares, Radiant and Westinghouse – were also selected by the Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to build microreactors at three Air Force bases.