Military bases and installations are hardly immune to the problems of the U.S. power grid, which was struggling to handle the nation’s needs even before the AI boom added a huge new demand for electricity.
“You can reasonably take the provocative stance that in the AI race, energy actually doesn’t matter, the problem’s so bad. We have a problem with our critical infrastructure today in all three of those buckets”: power generation, transmission, and system use, Tori Shivanandan, president and chief operating officer at Radiant Nuclear, said Monday during Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech event in Aspen, Colo.
The Pentagon wants to know whether small nuclear reactors are part of the solution, and Shivanandan says her company can help.
“Radiant is about 18 months away from delivering our first reactor to a U.S. military base. The U.S. military is a bold first customer here. Importantly, because failures are really bad,” said Shivanandan. “Many have experienced the outage in Texas, unaware that our critical bases for the Air Force were down for not just hours but days, but also the grid fails, that’s hospitals, that’s livelihood.”
The company plans to deploy small nuclear reactors at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colo., and begin testing the reactor this summer at the Idaho National Laboratory, Axios Denver reported.
The Pentagon is the “largest institutional customer of power in the U.S…and they’re down to which use case. When the grid is under attack, where do we need to make sure that power is up and consistent? These are use cases for one megawatt micro reactors. You can imagine across the US—both on military and off military bases. When it comes to planning for our worst days, which is happening a lot in Washington right now. They’re being—with a scalpel, deciding which infrastructure we need to make sure has reliable base load power.”
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Commercial companies reporting for duty? House lawmakers want the Pentagon to create a “civil reserve industrial base” of commercial companies the military can lean on during peacetime and contingency operations, according to a provision in the House Armed Services Committee’s draft defense policy bill.
- If adopted, the program would sit under the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment shop with the goal of enhancing “the availability and responsiveness of sustainment and repair capabilities” for military operations and include “arrangements to store, maintain, and manage replenishment parts and related equipment,” according to legislative language.
- The Pentagon would “identify” commercial facilities near areas of operation, including each combatant command, and facilities in allied and partner nations.
- Companies would provide facilities and personnel.
- Another provision pushes the Army to modernize its organic industrial base. The measure calls for an updated resourcing model that reduces Army depot production costs and that those costs are competitive with the private sector. It would also limit the Army Secretary from “decreasing workload at an Army depot by more than 10 percent” without congressional notice.
Making moves + other news
- Drone boats on a rescue mission. The crew of an Apache helicopter downed near the Strait of Hormuz were rescued by a robot surface vessel built by Saronic. The 24-foot Navy drone was sent to the CENTCOM region in March and operated by Task Force 59. The boat picked up crew members and moved them to another location where they were retrieved by helicopter, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports.
- Raytheon is planning a $100 million expansion of its Portsmouth, R.I. facility which produces and tests Patriot missile subcomponents. The move will increase production, lower tier air and missile defense sensor testing, and ultimately help speed up deliveries, Tom Laliberty, Raytheon’s land and air defense systems president said in a news release.
- The Space Force awarded $437.7 million across two contracts to produce the first satellites for its Protected Tactical Satellite Communications (SATCOM) – Global (PTS-G) program. The satellites will provide anti-jamming and other counter measures to maintain connectivity in contested communications environments, according to a news release sent Tuesday.
- The Pentagon released its list of banned Chinese companies on Monday. E-commerce conglomerate Alibaba is a new addition, alongside Baidu and BYD, a car manufacturer, CNBC’s Anniek Bao writes. Alibaba denounced its inclusion on the list, calling it baseless and threatening legal action: “Alibaba is not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy. We will take all available legal action against attempts to misrepresent our company,” the company said in a statement.
- Counterdrone company Epirus adds to its C-suite with Mark Cuyler as chief operating officer and Mark Horton as its chief people officer. Cuyler hails from Saildrone and Horton from Magic AI.
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