⚛️ U.S. Army Wants 9 Reactors by 2028

The U.S. Army just dropped one of the biggest nuclear announcements of the year.

This week they unveiled the Janus Program, a plan to deploy up to 9 microreactors across U.S. bases by 2028.

While the specific design wasn’t mentioned, the Army explicitly said Janus builds on lessons learned from Project Pele.

Project Pele’s reactor design is a 1.5 MWe high temperature gas-cooled microreactor built by BWX Technologies.

Each Janus unit will likely be between 1 and 20 MW, small on paper, massive in impact. One reactor could power an entire military installation: data centers, radar arrays, command posts, everything. No power lines, no resupply convoys. Just a truck-sized reactor built to survive combat and run for years on its own.

The legal backbone is already in place. The program fulfills Executive Order 14299, which requires at least one operational reactor on a U.S. base by September 2028. It’s a direct policy response to rising grid threats and a recognition that diesel convoys and fragile infrastructure aren’t sustainable in modern warfare.

“The Army isn’t doing PowerPoints anymore,” said Dr. Jeff Waksman, who also led the Pentagon’s Project Pele. “We’re building hardware.”

And that’s exactly what this is, the first large-scale push to make next-gen microreactors real.

Under the Janus model, the Army is copying NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) playbook, milestone-based contracts that fund companies when they hit engineering goals, not bureaucracy checkboxes. Reactors will be commercially owned and operated, with the Army providing oversight, fuel-cycle support, and regulatory cover.

For investors: This is a commercial catalyst not just for microreactors, but the entire nuclear sector. It opens doors for microreactor developers, HALEU fuel suppliers, and component manufacturers across the nuclear supply chain.

For the uranium market, defense procurement means guaranteed offtake, multi-year contracts, and a buyer that never misses a payment. Once nuclear fuel becomes part of the Pentagon’s logistics system, it creates a steady, long-term bid for fuel that anchors the market.

🚀Amazon Triples Nuclear Plans

Amazon just went full Bezos on nuclear.

The company is tripling the size of its planned X-energy SMR site in Washington, scaling the “Cascade Advanced Energy Facility” from 320 MW (4 reactors) to 960 MW (12 reactors) of clean power, enough to run a hyperscale data center and then some.

The new plan calls for 12 Xe-100s (80 MW) high-temperature gas-cooled reactors that uses TRISO fuel and helium instead of water. The project will operate alongside the Columbia Generating Station, the Pacific Northwest’s only existing nuclear plant, effectively turning the area into a regional energy hub.

To clarify: Amazon isn’t signing a power purchase agreement, it’s financing the build directly. That gives the project far better odds of actually being completed and positions Amazon as part utility, part investor, part reactor accelerator. Power will flow to Energy Northwest, which will feed Amazon’s growing fleet of AI-hungry data centers in the region.

Construction is expected to begin by the end of this decade, with electricity generation targeted for the early 2030s.

For investors: When the biggest company on Earth starts building its own reactors, the question isn’t if nuclear will power the digital economy, it’s how fast and which company to bet on. That’s exactly what we cover in Nuclear Update Premium.

💼 Last Week in Premium: Anders’ Uranium Playbook

Last week in Nuclear Update Premium, we featured a special guest post from Anders, known on X (formerly Twitter) as @Swedish_Uranium. He’s an investor with 20 years of experience navigating uranium cycles.

Anders laid out his full uranium strategy: from the “big five” producers driving the sector to the small caps with real torque. He shared his portfolio allocations, ETF rebalancing tactics, and hard-earned lessons from two decades in the trenches of the uranium market.

If you missed it, you can still catch up, it’s a must for anyone looking to see how seasoned uranium investors are positioning for the next leg of the bull run.

👇Read it now in Nuclear Update Premium👇

☢️ The Physicist Who Ate Uranium

In 1985, American nuclear engineer Galen Winsor did something radical: he ate uranium. Winsor wanted to prove that the world’s fear of radiation was wildly overblown, arguing that a lifetime near a coal plant was more dangerous than swallowing trace uranium.

He made his point, finished the demonstration, and went on with his life, lecturing, consulting, and advocating for nuclear power until his death in 2008, at the age of 82.

Sometimes, the most powerful experiments aren’t done in a lab, they’re done in front of a terrified audience.

Check out the video below👇

(Also, please don’t eat uranium.)

🔥 DOE Drops Fusion Roadmap: Wants Fusion Power by the 2030s

The U.S. Department of Energy just released its Fusion Science & Technology Roadmap, a full-blown national strategy to move fusion from experiment to electricity, and fast.

The goal: commercial fusion on the U.S. grid by the mid-2030s.

The roadmap, called Build–Innovate–Grow, lays out a concrete plan to close the final engineering gaps that have kept fusion in the “someday” category for decades.

Build: DOE is setting up dedicated facilities for fusion materials testing, plasma-facing components, and blanket technology (which captures energy from the reaction). They’ll expand tritium fuel cycle research at national labs and build new test stands for confinement magnets and high-heat systems.

Innovate: Fusion startups will get access to AI and supercomputing infrastructure to model plasma behavior in real time. The DOE is also launching “digital twin” simulation platforms, virtual reactors that can be tested thousands of times before hardware is ever built.

Grow: The plan calls for a network of regional fusion manufacturing hubs and workforce pipelines, modeled on the way the semiconductor and space sectors scaled up. Public-private partnerships will fund early supply chain development, from specialized alloys to superconducting magnets.

More than 600 scientists, engineers, and industry leaders contributed to the roadmap, which DOE says will prioritize six key technology areas: materials, plasma confinement, tritium fuel cycle, cooling blankets, plant engineering, and integration.

With $9 billion in private capital already chasing fusion, DOE’s plan is the scaffolding to make it real.

Read the full roadmap here: Build-Innovate-Grow 

For investors: People love to say fusion will derail the uranium trade, but the truth is we don’t even have enough uranium to fuel the ~440 reactors already running, let alone the 70-plus under construction that’ll need new supply. Add in restarts, life extensions, and rising enrichment demand, and it’s clear that uranium has only one way to go: up.

⚛️For the Nu-clearly Curious

Oklo and UK nuclear firm to invest $2 billion in fuel plants
Oklo has partnered with UK’s Newcleo to invest up to $2 billion to build advanced nuclear fuel fabrication facilities in the U.S. The projects aim to fission surplus plutonium into usable fuel, boosting domestic supply chains and accelerating deployment of next-gen reactors.

Last Energy to build 5 MW microreactor to demonstrate safe, low-power criticality
Last Energy and the Texas A&M University System have announced the plans to deploy Last Energy’s PWR-5 reactor. The PWR-5 is a 5 MW four-loop pressurized water reactor (PWR) with a 72 months fuel cycle. The reactor will be built to initially demonstrate safe, low-power criticality and, then in later phases, the ability to generate electricity for the grid. The project is fully financed with private capital and is expected to begin testing in the summer of next year.

Morgan Stanley Introduces National Security Index Featuring 39 Essential Companies in Strategic Sectors
Morgan Stanley introduced the “National Security Index” featuring 39 companies across four strategic sectors: nuclear & uranium, lithium, rare earths & strategic metals, and batteries & energy storage. Nuclear and uranium make up 38% of the index, a major nod to the sector’s growing national-security relevance.

Radiant is investing $280 million in nuclear manufacturing and R&D facilities In the Oak Ridge area
Radiant has selected Tennessee for a $280 million investment that will expand the company’s nuclear manufacturing and research and development (R&D) to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Through the project, Radiant will create 175 new jobs that will directly support the development and mass production of Radiant’s Kaleidos, a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor designed to produce 1.2 MW of electricity.

🩺Curing Cancer With Accelerated Protons

Welcome back to Atomic Alternatives, where we highlight the unexpected ways nuclear tech is quietly reshaping the world, one atom at a time.

This week we’re fighting cancer.

Proton therapy is one of the most advanced forms of radiation treatment, using accelerated protons instead of traditional high-energy X-rays to blast tumors with surgical precision.

The difference? Protons release most of their energy at a very specific depth (the “Bragg peak”), meaning they can destroy cancer cells without frying the healthy tissue around them.

That precision is game-changing for hard-to-treat cancers (brain, spinal, pediatric) where every millimeter matters.

So far, the tech isn’t cheap. A single proton therapy facility can cost upwards of $100–$200 million, thanks to the massive particle accelerators required to launch those protons at near-light speeds.

But costs are falling fast. Compact accelerators, superconducting magnets, and even linac-based proton systems are bringing these life-saving machines within reach of more hospitals worldwide.

From the heart of a reactor to the heart of medicine, the atom’s story keeps evolving.

😂Meme of The Week

That’s a wrap for this week’s edition.

Until next time: stay charged, stay critical (like a reactor), and keep glowing😎

— Fredrik

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