Defense Business Brief: Reactors for military bases?; NDAA update; Drone-boat rescue

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.”WelcomeYou’ve reached the Defense Business Brief, where we dig into what the Pentagon buys, who they’re buying from, and why. Send along your tips, feedback, and song recommendations to lwilliams@defenseone.com. Check out the Defense Business Brief archive here, and tell your friends to subscribe!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.

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