Officials from the Office of the Secretary of Defense are on the island for a week for what they call an academic trip for Project Pele.

A nuclear power reactor with mobile capabilities for the Department of Defense, with an order of magnitude cost of around 0.6 to 0.7 billion dollars. 

Jeff Waksman is the program director for Project Pele for DOD. 

“We are currently in the process of beginning to build the reactor–it is a prototype. It is going to be built in Virginia, and it’s gonna be tested in Idaho. But the DOD has to decide if it wants to build more nuclear reactors in the future, and before that decision gets made, we have to understand what places to have those reactors,” Waksman said.

DOD is looking at over 100 sights for potential nuclear reactor sights. Waksman and his team have already visited Hawaii and now Guam with other islands in the Pacific being analyzed. 

And while Waksman reiterates that there are no concrete plans to bring a reactor to the island and that the visit is to gain an understanding of power needs, power resiliency, and requirements to inform decision-makers on the ideal locations for the reactor, they are here also gathering environmental, political, and cultural information.  

Waksman said, “Specific locations that are culturally sensitive, the drinking water is a concern, corrosion is a big concern that’s metallic on the island, I'd say those are some of the big ones we gathered from being here…Considering the cultural and political issues. Is this a place that wants nuclear power, or is this a place that doesn’t? In the modern day, the DOD is gonna wanna know that the local population, for the most part, is okay with something like this— they’re not gonna try and put it somewhere that doesn’t want it.” 

And outside of the Joint Region Marianas gates, activists with the group Prutehi Litekyan made it clear they do not want the nuclear reactor here. 

Moneka Flores is with the group, “They are going to try and tell us that it's for our benefit for the security of our island. But we know that if they need this nuclear power generation to support the missile defense system, should we be attacked, these nuclear reactors will pose tremendous harm to our community and our island –including permanent contamination of our groundwater, our soil, and nuclear radiation and death.” 

Flores questioned the potential impacts of the project.

“We have to think about nuclear waste. Where are those hazardous materials going to be stored? Where are they going to be stored? Again, beyond the risk of conflict, we are a hot spot for typhoons. The military is the world’s largest producer of emissions and is a huge contributor to the climate crisis. We had a super typhoon just in 2023. Those typhoons can harm nuclear reactors,” Flores said. 

She’s also curious about blast radiuses.

 Waksman explained the harm of being in the vicinity of a broken nuclear reactor. He said one of the misperceptions about nuclear danger is around uranium… but he contends the real harm comes from…

“The harm comes from–if you run a nuclear reactor for a while, there’s waste products. It's the same way you run your car; things like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide–so the nuclear reactor has its own waste product gases. Things like cesium and so those gases,  if they were to get out and you breathe them in and you breathe in enough of them, it could increase your risk of cancer. So that’s really what the fear is if you were to be in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor that’s broken,” Waksman explained. 

He added the reactor is small with not much radioactive material, in addition to encapsulated fuel with containment systems. He also said in a 500-bomb attack scenario, all radioactive material is not gonna be released at once. 

Meantime, the prototype is in the process of being built in Virginia to be tested in Idaho sometime around 2025.