The key point in here is that fully half of the fatalities on the battlefield are attacks on oil convoys supplying troops. If you can have a nuclear power sourc

The key point in here is that fully half of the fatalities on the battlefield are attacks on oil convoys supplying troops. If you can have a nuclear power source you don't need to truck oil around and your exposure goes way down. Good old mass-to-energy conversions being 2,000,000x more energetic per reaction than combustion. The army developed lots of small reactors for similar reasons back in the late 1950s/early 1960s but they just were too expensive. 10x too expensive even in wartime, according to some 1960s congressional testimony I was reading the other day. Here's the army's old ML-1 reactor (nitrogen cooled, truck mounted): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1 I think this time they want to try to get costs down more.