Walsh, industry reps discuss “American energy hub” at Oak Ridge cleanup site

On October 27, Tim Walsh, assistant secretary for the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management, gathered with industry representatives at the former site of the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant to showcase several nuclear energy projects in development near the site.

Speaking to the press at East Tennessee Technology Park, Walsh touted the development as a sign of the success of DOE-EM's mission at Oak Ridge and other DOE cleanup sites, which he said was "to restore the sites for community re-reuse and economic development." The DOE estimates that investment in the projects featured at the press event totals more than $15 billion.

Joining Walsh were four company executives:

Jean-Luc Palayer, chief executive officer and president of uranium enrichment company Orano USA.

Brandon Blamer, vice president of engineering at fuel fabrication firm TRISO-X.

Matt Wilson, vice president of capital projects at microreactor developer Radiant Industries.

Nikki Sizemore, director of government affairs at advanced reactor developer Kairos Power.

Each company is in a different stage of progress at its own Oak Ridge facility. TRISO-X completed the primary building structure of its TX-1 fuel fabrication plant in September 2026; five months earlier, in April, Kairos began constructing its Hermes 2 fluoride salt-cooled reactor. Both Orano's Project Ike Enrichment Facility and Radiant's R-50 production facility are in the middle of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's preconstruction licensing process, and the NRC has granted them both an accelerated review.

The four companies represent different but complementary parts of the nuclear energy cycle, which led Walsh to describe ETTP as a "nuclear hub," reinforcing the characterization of the site by the DOE as an "American energy hub" that it believes will drive economic growth.

When asked about that economic growth, specifically in the context of jobs for local residents, Walsh acknowledged that DOE-EM's cleanup of legacy nuclear sites, including Oak Ridge, has been a source of employment. However, he also expressed a belief that accelerating cleanup would promote revitalization and a transition to private-sector jobs with the companies developing their projects on cleanup site land, saying, "The EM workforce lives in this local community, so they want to see jobs for their kids and their grandkids, and they want to see the local community prosper."

The company representatives in attendance largely echoed Walsh's statements. Wilson said that he expected Radiant to have about 1,000 open positions at its TX-1 and TX-2 fabrication facilities, while Palayer said that Orano chose to build its enrichment plant at Oak Ridge in part because of Tennessee's educational and vocational training programs and their potential to provide staff for the facility. Walsh added that Oak Ridge community officials estimate a need for approximately 10,000 construction workers to support site development over the next five years, with some of those jobs becoming permanent because of future development.

Although DOE-EM's cleanup of ETTP, which began in 1996, is nearly complete, cleanup efforts continue at two other areas of the Oak Ridge Reservation site: Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex, both of which serve as homes to nuclear energy projects even as cleanup continues. DOE-EM currently manages cleanup of 16 legacy nuclear sites across the United States and is pursuing a goal of broadly repurposing the sites as centers for future industrial development.

The NLIC connection: The description of ETTP as a nuclear energy hub mirrors the description of sites that the DOE hopes to develop under another program: the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses (NLIC) initiative. Announced in January, the program seeks to establish new technology campuses in several states, each of which would support work across the nuclear fuel cycle.

When asked about how projects at Oak Ridge connect to the NLIC program and the selection of Tennessee as a final contender to host one of the campuses, Walsh said that existing sites that perform a range of activities similar to what's proposed for the NLIC sites, such as ORNL, Idaho National Laboratory, and the Savannah River Site, are driving the innovation employed by companies such as the ones planning to operate at ETTP.

Walsh then broached the topic of a used fuel repository-which the DOE has required every state applying for the NLIC program to be willing to host-in a way that suggested that an NLIC campus in Tennessee could complement the work planned for ETTP. "The last component that we need to solve is really a final repository for the spent nuclear fuel," he said.