WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup complex will soon become host to “energy dominance parks,” Tim Walsh, the assistant secretary of energy for Environmental Management, said here Tuesday evening.
In coming months, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management will make announcements for both data centers for artificial intelligence (AI) and new nuclear power, Walsh told the House Cleanup Caucus gathering at the Rayburn House Office Building.
“We are going to call them American energy dominance parks” at Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and elsewhere, Walsh told the gathering of largely DOE representatives and contractors, hosted by co-chairs Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.).
“We are going to be deploying nuclear reactors, not just SMRs,” Walsh said, alluding to small modular reactors (SMRs). Full-size nuclear plants, such as Westinghouse’s AP 1000 reactors, could also be built over time, he added.
“We are not using cleanup dollars,” Walsh said. The data centers and nuclear projects will be underwritten in part by deep-pocketed “hyper-scalers,” he said, a term used to refer to cloud computing behemoths like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Before the Senate confirmed Walsh in October to head the Office of Environmental Management, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright brought Walsh in as a senior adviser to talk to hyper-scalers about data centers at DOE sites. As part of these conversations, Walsh realized “how limited our grid available energy was.”
The Donald Trump administration is working to cut red tape in order to ease nuclear reactor development, Walsh said. In the beginning, however, natural gas-powered electricity will serve as a “bridge” until the new nuclear generation is available for the data centers, Walsh said.
Amidst the nuclear deployments, Walsh said DOE will look to accelerate nuclear cleanup, seeking to get much more remediation done by 2040.Current cleanup targets for some sites are so far into the future, such as 2080, it is too easy for the organization to allow projects to slide, Walsh said.
Following his speech, Walsh declined to elaborate on the energy project plans, telling Exchange Monitor he was not at liberty to share details at this time. Walsh said during the speech to expect major announcements in the next four to five months.