HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — Project Pele officials are on Guam as part of a research tour to learn about different power situations and needs at various locations, as well as local concerns and issues, to help the Department of Defense determine whether mobile nuclear reactors should be built and where to place them.
The project is an effort to design, build and demonstrate a prototype mobile nuclear reactor for the military. According to program manager Jeff Waksman, the project now is in the process of building the prototype, which will be done in Virginia.
Testing will take place in Idaho and, while the prototype won’t leave the state, the DOD has to decide whether it wants to build more of those reactors in the future, Waksman added.
“Before that decision can get made, we have to understand what would be the right places to have those reactors. So, we are going all around to different places across the contiguous 48 states, as well as Alaska, and we’ve been to Hawaii, and we’re out here, just to learn about the different situations that are in different locations – what their power needs are, what their power resiliency requirements are, as well as local political and cultural issues,” Waksman said Wednesday during a media roundtable at Joint Region Marianas headquarters in Nimitz Hill, Piti.
“We want to be sensitive to local populations. The DOD is not just going to build nuclear reactors and show up places and say, ‘Hey, would you guys like one?’ This is just an academic trip that we’re on, but it’s based on the fact that hopefully our prototype will be on and operating within the next couple of years,” Waksman added.
Concerns
Nuclear power has been a controversial issue on Guam, and one that’s been tied to ongoing efforts to build a missile defense system on the island.
While Waksman and other officials prepared to greet the media on Wednesday, outside the JRM offices stood a handful of protesters bearing signs that read “no nukes” and “no buildup, no war.”
Among them was Monaeka Flores, a member of the activist group Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian. Flores said Project Pele reactors would pose “tremendous harm” to Guam should the island be attacked, including “permanent contamination” of groundwater and soil, and exposure of the community to nuclear radiation “and death.” But even outside the realm of military conflict, Flores noted that Guam remains vulnerable to typhoons.
“We had a supertyphoon just in 2023. Those typhoons can harm nuclear reactors. There are many risks. We don’t know enough, and we are such a small island. We don’t need nuclear radiation here. We don’t need more contamination here. We have a long history of military contamination here that’s never been dealt with. We have 19 Superfund sites. We have so many people in our community dying from cancers related to Agent Orange (herbicide) and other toxic exposures, and this just poses more of those threats for our island,” Flores said.
Last year, amid concerns driven by language in the U.S. Senate version of the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which directed a briefing on the potential use of microreactors on Guam, Sen. Sabina Perez and two other senators introduced Bill 151-37, which would ban the production and use of nuclear energy on Guam.
However, the briefing language was ultimately stripped out of the final compromise version of the NDAA.
No plans for nuclear power in missile defense
Meanwhile, JRM submitted testimony on Bill 151, stating that military officials believe the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 would preempt the proposed ban, and that the Supreme Court of the United States also made it clear that the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over the construction and operation of nuclear power plants in the U.S.
Aside from barring the Guam Power Authority from using nuclear technology and prohibiting the Department of Defense from providing nuclear power to local utilities, JRM said it did not see any immediate effect from the proposed ban on the Department of Defense mission on Guam.
JRM also stated that Project Pele is not being considered for deployment in Guam or the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and added that the Missile Defense Agency is not including microreactors into the missile defense project’s architecture.
On Wednesday, Waksman told media there are “no plans at this time” for the missile defense system to utilize nuclear power or for a Project Pele reactor to come to Guam.
“The Guam defense initiative, my understanding is that they’ve already figured out how to they’re going to power it, and using non-nuclear (power). So, at this time, I don’t foresee a scenario where it would be used to power that. But anything is possible in the future, so I can’t make future promises for the Department of Defense. But I can tell you I’ve had conversations with the MDA, and I’ve had conversations with Joint Region Marianas and all of the various senior officials around here, and we’ve all been clear that there’s no plans to use nuclear reactors for the Guam defense initiative,” Waksman said.
And although officials are conducting research to guide potential future decisions on where to place Project Pele mobile reactors, Waksman said he personally believed the military likely would start with operating reactors in the 50 states.
“That’s just my educated guess. I don’t speak for the Pentagon,” Waksman said. “Again, just speaking for myself, I would be surprised if Guam was the first place that one of these went to.”
The prototype is projected to be shipped to Idaho by mid to late 2025, but it will take six months after that for the reactor to begin operating.
“Hopefully, by that point, the DOD has made a formal decision about whether they want to buy more. But even after that, it’s going to be several more years for those to be built. So, no one’s going to be deploying nuclear reactors on a DOD base in the next four or five years,” Waksman said.
Mobile reactor
The Project Pele prototype is designed for military purposes, but Waksman said he expects there will be commercial spinoffs. The system is separated into four boxes – the reactor, the heat exchanger, power conversion and computer controls. It’s meant to fit into four 20-foot containers and to produce one to five megawatts of net electrical power for a minimum of three years at full operation.
The system is designed to power specific assets or critical infrastructure, Waksman said, and part of the analysis is to understand what the right power levels are for different locations.
“The DOD might want a bigger reactor or smaller reactor. That would be a decision that would be made in the future by future decision-makers,” he said.
Waksman said one requirement for Project Pele is to leave behind no waste.
“A large civilian commercial nuclear power plant has the capability on site to handle nuclear waste. But if we’re in some remote arctic environment or some island in the Pacific, they’re not going to have that ability on hand. So we would have to take everything,” Waksman added.
Waksman also stated that the reactor is “a passively safe system,” and it would be physically impossible for it to have a nuclear meltdown or become a “mushroom cloud.”
“You can break it and you would have a radiological release of a small amount. We anticipate that you’d be talking about a couple (of) hundred yards of a bad day where you don’t want to breath in the air. But there is not enough nuclear material. And the fuel that we’re using, to have a situation where you would have to evacuate miles, that’s just not a scenario that’s possible with the system,” Waksman said.
He also stated that there should be no water contamination, and the worst-case fear would be gases that people would want to avoid breathing in.
In addition to speaking with the media on Wednesday, Waksman said he already had met with the governor and was to speak with lawmakers by Thursday afternoon.
Project Pele project manager Jeff Waksman, center, answers questions during a media roundtable Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2024, at Joint Region Marianas headquarters on Nimitz Hill.
