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A Maryland Army base is about to become an unlikely showcase for a new kind of nuclear power. A reactor developer announced that it will supply its technology for a power project planned at Aberdeen Proving Ground, an Army research and testing installation. The plan pairs natural gas generation with advanced nuclear, and it gives a young technology something it rarely has: a named place to be built.
The developer is Terrestrial Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: IMSR), and its technology is the Integral Molten Salt Reactor, known as the IMSR. The project is led by Ameresco, Inc. (NYSE: AMRC), which the Army selected after a competitive request for proposals. It will be built in phases, sell power to the regional electricity market, and make the base’s own electricity supply more resilient. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding in June 2025 to find sites and develop projects together, and this is a concrete site that grew out of that agreement.
To see why that matters, it helps to know what a molten salt reactor is. Most nuclear plants running today use water to carry heat away from the core. A molten salt reactor uses a liquid salt instead. Developers say the salt operates at high temperature and low pressure, which supports safety and lets a plant supply industrial heat as well as electricity.
The field is still young, and most of the work so far has been testing rather than selling power. Kairos Power is building its Hermes demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Natura Resources has said it is on track to deploy a molten salt research reactor in 2026. In Denmark, Copenhagen Atomics built a full-scale prototype in 2023 and tested it with non-radioactive salts. Four developers, Terrestrial among them, have also signed agreements to bring reactors to the Texas A&M RELLIS campus. Behind all of this sits a federal goal to triple U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050.
Terrestrial’s design uses graphite to moderate the reaction and a core unit that can be replaced. The company plans to swap the core every seven years and expects that recurring supply of parts to bring in most of each plant’s lifetime revenue. The fuel is standard-assay low-enriched uranium, with less than 5% U-235, which draws on commercial fuel supply chains that already exist. At 390 MWe, the plant is sized for large industrial users, and its output can be adjusted to fit a site.
Regulators are still working through the paperwork. Terrestrial has an approved topical report on design criteria from 2025 and another on postulated initiating events from 2026. On September 10th it submitted a graphite topical report to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the second of at least three planned this year ahead of an eventual license application. The company is aiming for its first commercial plants in the early 2030s.
A named Army site helps a developer that has no operating plant yet. It offers a host location and a project partner that already serves federal customers. It is not a finished deal, though. The project still has to move through federal environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, along with state permitting, and each step can take time. Terrestrial’s own release lists delays, cost overruns, and regulatory approvals among its risks.
Nothing here changes the calendar overnight, since the early 2030s is still years away and the reactor has to earn its licenses first. Still, a technology that has spent decades mostly in laboratories now has a place on a military installation. The next thing to watch is whether the reviews and permits keep pace with the announcement.
