Navy Reactor in Shipping Container
25th October 2026
Back in September we told you the Navy was putting a nuclear reactor on a weapons base in southern Indiana, and that the Pentagon wouldn’t say who was building it. Well, now it has. On October 20 the Department of the Navy picked Radiant Industries, a startup out of El Segundo, California, to design, build and deliver what the release calls a prototype Microreactor Power Plant at Naval Weapons Station Crane.
The machine is Radiant’s Kaleidos, and you can picture it pretty easily. It’s a 1-megawatt reactor that ships inside a 35-foot container, weighs about 70 tons by the company’s own figures, and is supposed to run for five years before anyone has to touch the fuel. That’s the pitch, anyway.
So is the Navy buying a reactor? Not exactly. The September announcement from the Department of War described the Crane unit as commercially owned and operated, which means Radiant builds it, Radiant runs it, and the base buys the power. The company is one of five the Army signed up in August under its Janus Program, and the Navy is basically borrowing the Army’s contract rather than running its own competition. The Navy says that’s faster. From the looks of things it’s also a lot less paperwork.