US Air Force Seeks Small Nuclear Reactors to Power Military Bases

Six weeks after Valar Atomics flew a small nuclear reactor aboard a C-17 from March Air Reserve Base to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, the Air Force escalated its nuclear ambitions with a formal request for information targeting reactors in the 1-to-300-megawatt range, opening what could become the military's most consequential energy procurement in a generation.

The RFI, posted in late March and reported across industry channels on March 30, asks vendors to demonstrate their capability to "design, license, fuel, construct, and deploy Small, Micro, or Modular Reactor technologies in compliance with applicable regulatory, safety, environmental, and security requirements." The power floor of 1 MWe and ceiling of 300 MWe is a deliberate signal: the Air Force explicitly ruled out reactors of 1,000 MWe or greater, drawing a bright line around deployable, installation-scale systems rather than utility-scale plants. According to the RFI documents, the Air Force wants to assess industry confidence in achieving "a commercially viable Nth-of-a-Kind capability," meaning it is not interested in one-off demonstrations; it wants a production-ready supply chain.

Reading the RFI's technical checklist tells you almost everything about what the Air Force is actually willing to buy. Vendors must address NRC licensing status or an equivalent regulatory pathway, fuel availability including HALEU considerations for advanced designs, transportation and logistics for modular systems, physical and cyber security integration, operations and maintenance staffing, and estimated construction timelines and costs. That HALEU requirement is a bottleneck worth watching: only a handful of advanced reactor designs run on it, and the domestic fuel enrichment infrastructure is still maturing. Developers who can show a credible HALEU supply chain in their April 19 responses will have a meaningful edge.

The vendor field is deep. BWXT of Lynchburg, Virginia, Westinghouse of Cranberry, Pennsylvania, and Rolls-Royce all bring established nuclear manufacturing credentials. Oklo Inc. of Santa Clara, California, already has a toehold at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, where it was tapped to build a microreactor under a 30-year power purchase agreement. Valar Atomics of Hawthorne, California, demonstrated airlift-compatibility with its C-17 flight in February. X-Energy of Rockville, Maryland, brings Amazon-backed scale and an 80-MWe high-temperature gas-cooled design. TerraPower of Bellevue, Washington, rounds out a competitive field that now exceeds half a dozen serious contenders.

The procurement signals to track after April 19 are specific: whether the Air Force moves to a competitive request for proposals or carves out a small business set-aside, which contracting vehicle it selects, and whether site selection expands beyond Eielson to bases across the continental United States. The RFI is also coordinated with defense and energy offices, which means DOE's fuel logistics programs and the NRC's licensing pipeline are implicitly part of the evaluation.

For the civilian SMR ecosystem, the Air Force's timing matters almost as much as the procurement itself. Military land deployments can move faster than civilian utility projects because they sidestep some of the most contentious local siting battles; a contract award at an Air Force installation could put steel in the ground before many commercial projects clear their environmental reviews. The pressure is now on developers to show, in 16 days, that their designs are not just technically credible but logistically and legally ready to wear a uniform.