The U.S. Navy’s move toward small modular reactors is not a leap into speculative technology so much as the logical endpoint of a problem the service has been wrestling with for a decade: its shore installations depend on a civilian electric grid that the Navy does not control and cannot guarantee, even as those installations host the nuclear-powered carriers, submarines, and command infrastructure the nation relies on most in a crisis.
Key Points
- The Navy’s August 2025 solicitation explicitly names small modular nuclear reactors among the technologies it wants industry to propose for installation power resilience
- Congress created a statutory ten-year pilot program in December 2025 requiring the Navy to test small modular or mobile reactors at one or more installations
- Four Virginia sites — Oceana, South Potomac, Yorktown, and Quantico — have surfaced in reporting as candidates among a larger pool, though the Navy has not published a final selection list
- A nearer-term demonstration will use the nuclear-powered carrier USS Gerald R. Ford to supply shore power at Naval Station Norfolk this summer
- No small modular reactor has yet been deployed anywhere in the United States for this mission, which keeps the Navy’s 99.9% reliability target a design goal rather than a proven result
What the Navy Actually Asked For
On August 7, 2025, the Department of the Navy published a solicitation seeking what it called “execution-ready prototypes” for installation energy resilience — systems capable of delivering 99.9% availability “even if the public grid goes dark.” Small modular nuclear reactors sit alongside geothermal systems, advanced battery storage, and other dispatchable technologies on the list of eligible solutions. That phrasing matters: this is a request for competing proposals, not a procurement order for a specific reactor design, and the Navy structured it to let nuclear compete against — rather than automatically replace — other resilience technologies.
The rationale the Navy gives is operational, not ideological. Installations that host carrier strike groups, submarine tenders, and Marine Corps logistics depend on commercial power for everything from drydock operations to data centers; a prolonged regional outage, whether from storm, cyberattack, or infrastructure failure, could degrade mission-critical functions that have nothing to do with combat power at sea. The solicitation frames the goal as safeguarding those operations and ensuring uninterrupted power “in any operating environment” — language that reads less like enthusiasm for a new technology and more like risk management for an old vulnerability.
Congress Builds the Legal Scaffolding
Solicitations express intent; statutes create obligation. On December 18, 2025, Congress enacted a new chapter of the U.S. Code — 10 U.S.C. Chapter 873 — establishing a formal Pilot Program on Navy Installation Nuclear Energy. The law requires the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations, and Environment to launch, within one year, a ten-year pilot assessing small modular or mobile reactors at one or more naval installations. That statutory floor — “one or more” — is notably more conservative than the four-site figure now circulating in public discussion, and the gap between the two is worth sitting with rather than papering over: Congress authorized a pilot, and reporting has identified candidate locations, but the Navy has not yet published a document that formally narrows the field to four.
The Virginia Candidates and the Norfolk Demonstration
Reporting on the initiative has pointed to Naval Air Station Oceana, Naval Support Activity South Potomac, Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, and Marine Corps Base Quantico as four of roughly seven installations under consideration. Yorktown already has a concrete foothold in this process: the base signed a memorandum of understanding with Dominion Energy Virginia in June 2025 to study building a power plant on-site, including the possibility of a small modular reactor. That kind of utility partnership is typically the first visible step toward any installation-scale generation project, nuclear or otherwise, because it establishes interconnection rights and shared engineering work long before a reactor vendor is chosen.
The most vivid near-term proof point will arrive sooner and look nothing like a stationary reactor. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao told the House Armed Services Committee that USS Gerald R. Ford would supply shore power to Naval Station Norfolk this summer, stating plainly, “This summer, Norfolk Naval base is going to be powered from an aircraft carrier”. A Navy spokesman confirmed Norfolk as the first test location. It is a striking demonstration of what a nuclear-powered hull can already do — the Ford’s reactors are licensed, operational, and need no new regulatory pathway — but it answers a narrower question than the installation-reactor debate poses. Plugging a floating, already-licensed power plant into a pier for a season is a different engineering and regulatory problem than constructing, licensing, fueling, securing, and eventually decommissioning a land-based reactor meant to run for decades.
How This Fits a Longer Defense Pattern
None of this emerges from nowhere. The Pentagon has pursued mobile and installation-scale nuclear power before, most directly through Project Pele, the Defense Department effort to design and demonstrate a transportable microreactor, which traces its rationale to a 2016 Defense Science Board finding that the military needed a reliable power source without a long logistics tail. The Department broke ground on the Pele reactor at Idaho National Laboratory and has pushed toward outdoor testing. The Navy’s SMR push is best understood as that same strategic logic — reduce dependence on vulnerable fuel convoys and fragile grids — applied to fixed installations rather than expeditionary sites. It is an old military problem, fuel and power logistics, meeting a newer generation of reactor technology that developers argue is smaller, safer, and faster to build than the gigawatt-scale plants of the last century.
What Remains Open
The Navy has not published cost estimates, construction timelines, environmental reviews, or a site-selection memorandum explaining why particular installations were chosen over others. No small modular reactor has yet operated in the United States for this kind of mission, which means the 99.9% availability figure remains a design target the Navy wants industry to hit, not a result anyone has already measured. Those gaps are the normal, expected state of a program moving from solicitation to statutory pilot — not evidence that the underlying resilience case is weak. The Navy’s problem — grid dependence at installations that cannot afford to lose power — is well documented and long-standing; what is still being worked out is which technology, at which sites, on what schedule, solves it.
Sources:
insidedefense.com, navy.mil, in.gov
