PHOENIX —The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee is an example of where remediation successfully cleared the way for new nuclear and other business ventures, an Amentum executive told the Waste Management Symposia here last week.
The former Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion “plant has been transformed into a clean, modernized, multi-use industrial park, national park, and conservation area,” said Mark Whitney, president of Amentum’s President of the Amentum Energy & Environment business.
Years of work by Amentum-led UCOR, now United Cleanup Oak Ridge, has sparked significant reindustrialization projects, Whitney told the gathering.
With some of the most significant environmental remediation complete, and more than 1,800 acres transferred to local ownership from federal hands, to date 25 new businesses have set up shop, Whitney said. Big projects are also being planned:
Orano has announced plans to build a multi-billion-dollar uranium enrichment plant.
Kairos Power has broken ground on its Hermes low-power demonstration reactor, which will be a non-light water reactor.
Triso-X broke ground in 2023 on its fuel fabrication facility at the Horizon Center in Oak Ridge.
“So, thanks to successful cleanup operations that made land available for economic development, the Oak Ridge region is becoming a hub for a nuclear renaissance on the formerly contaminated government site,” Whitney said.
Factors such as power demand driven by artificial intelligence along with international decarbonization efforts are helping make a nuclear resurgence a reality, Whitney said. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported last year that it expects nuclear power capacity growth over the next 25 years to amount to at least 40% and in an upper-case scenario current capacity could more than double, he added.
“Historically, of course, there has been opposition to nuclear from varying parties that ebbs and flows over time; opposition often linked to safety and environmental concerns, including waste, but also based on very different issues, like economics – such as the significant capital requirements and cost increases and schedule delays in many new build projects,” Whitney said. Thankfully, nuclear fleet performance has improved significantly in recent decades, he added.
Amentum, which last year merged with the government contracting and cyber/intelligence arms of Jacobs, does extensive work in DOE nuclear cleanup, the National Nuclear Security Administration and various international projects.
Earlier this month Amentum was picked as project manager for Sizewell C, a new nuclear power station in the United Kingdom.
