As New York state continues a push toward a nuclear-powered future, the U.S. Army announced Wednesday that it will be siting a small nuclear reactor on Fort Drum military base near Watertown.<\/p>\n
State Assemblyman Scott Gray believes the announcement is the biggest thing to happen to the installation in 41 years, when the current version of 10th Mountain Division was formed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis essentially ensures Fort Drum is resilient, right? And their existence remains very strong and very much a part of a national defense,\u201d Gray added.<\/p>\n
Military officials held an online roundtable Wednesday declaring it will move forward with nuclear power on five installations across the country, including at Fort Drum.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a $2.2 billion endeavor. The Army is working with private companies to build what are known as small modular reactors, some roughly the size of a shipping container.<\/p>\n
In Fort Drum\u2019s case, Westinghouse will be building a 5-megawatt facility that will help ensure Drum stays powered in case of an issue with the grid.<\/p>\n
\u201cFort Drum is the Army\u2019s premier power-projection platform in the Northeast, and that makes us the right location for a Janus Program microreactor,\u201d Maj. Gen. Scott Naumann, 10th Mountain Division (LI) and Fort Drum commander, said in a statement. \u201cReadiness demands reliable power today, tomorrow, and in every contingency. The Janus microreactor initiative provides the resilient energy foundation our Soldiers need to remain ready whenever the nation calls.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cUnlike in prior conflicts, we now know that our domestic electric grid is potentially at risk in a conflict,\u201d Jeff Waksman, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for energy and sustainability, said.<\/p>\n
The expected start date for Drum\u2019s reactor is not yet known, but the Army does plan to unveil these five sites sometime in the next five years, including the goal of meeting an executive order deadline to have one up and running by September 2028.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’d rather not at this time speculate at who’s going to turn on first. But that’s going to start becoming clear once you start seeing the milestones at the site,\u201d Waksman said.<\/p>\n
The Army said the plan is to help the companies create these reactors for commercial sale and use.<\/p>\n
Gray said with the state\u2019s push to nuclear power, all eyes in Albany will be on this project.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is an opportunity to train and get workforce ready for future development for New York state’s effort,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Army also confirmed as budgets continue to tighten across the military as a whole, that Fort Drum is seen as critical, reiterating that it would not be moving forward with this project if the installation\u2019s future wasn\u2019t concrete.<\/p>\n
The Army said there are about 15 other sites it would like to place reactors within the five-year timeframe, but those sites have not yet been officially selected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As New York state continues a push toward a nuclear-powered future, the U.S. Army announced Wednesday that it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3477,257,661,9,11,10,49,51,50,12,2022,200],"class_list":["post-330714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-brian-dwyer","tag-central-ny","tag-military","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-news","tag-northern-ny","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}