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. These facilities will not be paid for by the taxpayers, Walsh said.
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.”
Walsh said he has been tapped by Wright as “the lead” for the AI data centers.
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 “easy to get complacent,” Walsh said.
For example, in its fiscal 2026 budget justification document, DOE current estimate for finishing all Hanford cleanup is sometime between 2086 and 2100.
“We need to move with urgency,” Walsh said. In addition, nuclear remediation contractors must learn “to do more with less,” he added.
During his comments, Walsh also stressed Environmental Management is looking to support its fellow DOE branches, especially the National Nuclear Security Administration’s stockpile modernization and reactor projects by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
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.
The Cleanup Caucus event was hosted by the Energy, Technology and Environmental Business Association, the Energy Facility Contractors Group and the Nuclear Energy Institute.