EnergyCast: Stakeholders Share Insight on Nuclear Renaissance at National Cleanup Workshop – Transcript

00:02I'm proud that EM is leading America's AI revolution. I mean, as a taxpayer, that makes me feel good about where our money's going.

00:15We aren't just managing the past, we are powering the future.

00:35Welcome to the 2026 National Cleanup Workshop in Arlington, Virginia. I'm Arissa Sarback. This year, the theme is powering and securing the future through restoration and revitalization. Energy leaders, stakeholders, and industry leaders all coming together to collaborate on how to best clean up the country's nuclear sites and reuse them.

00:54The Department of Energy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Environmental Management, Tim Walsh, kicking off the event as the keynote speaker. To me, it boils down to two words, urgency and impact, or maybe it's the outcomes. Those should be the north stars for our posture and decision-making.

01:12We will conduct our restoration projects with a sense of urgency and redevelop former legacy cleanup sites in a way that brings the biggest impact to our local communities and the nation. The Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management is tasked with cleaning up the 107 legacy nuclear sites that fueled United States wins in World War II and the Cold War.

01:37Now, many are getting a new life as EM works to modernize their nuclear infrastructure. Now that we've cleaned up 92 of those sites and we're down to last 15, we need to reinvigorate the mission and focus on the why.

01:53And the why we're cleaning up is to catalyze new economic development at those sites. One of those sites is in Pikedin, Ohio. It's one of three former gaseous diffusion plants in EM's portfolio that has set the bar for what's possible.

02:09When the facility was operating, we won the Cold War and everybody had a purpose and then when that stops and then the purpose kind of dissipates, you know, you think, well, what's next? And so you watch these buildings not operating anymore, getting prepared for demolition and honestly like the morale in the community is a little bit depressing because what was once vibrant is now, you know, just waiting to be demolished.

02:37So this is giving us a future. EM's cleanup is opening former and current federal land to attract new industry and generate new jobs. The biggest announcement that we've had is the soft bank announcement to build data center campus and a gas fired power plant as part of our reindustrialization of the site.

02:59The most exciting part of that is it's much bigger than the site. We're purchasing about 6,000 acres of private lands, which will become taxable property, providing a revenue stream to the local government so that we can invest in our infrastructure.

03:15When complete, the investment could total up to $500 billion to build the world's most powerful advanced computing campus and the world's largest single site natural gas power plant. Paducah, Kentucky is another former gaseous diffusion plant proud to share a similar story.

03:32Global Laser Enrichment purchased property adjoining the site and they're going to be enriching uranium. General Matter is leasing land from DOE. They're also going to be enriching uranium. And then just recently we had the announcement from Brookfield and a next era energy of a $100 billion investment in our community for a data center and then the energy component that's coming with that data center.

03:56Companies moving in bring employment opportunity. The president and CEO of the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce says families who moved away after the site ceased operations in 2013 are moving back and so are new residents. We've been a part of the Department of Energy for since the 1950s and we have said we didn't want to just be part of the legacy even though that is such a strong historical foundation for us as part when we were part of American defense.

04:24But now we really want to be a part of the future. Oak Ridge, Tennessee is home to the oldest former gaseous diffusion plant and the first to be shut down taking its operational jobs with it. Now that land is home to the next generation nuclear companies that have announced more than $10 billion in investments that will bring jobs back to the region.

04:43We have about 20 companies now that are using the OK-25 site and being dispersed across that in a multitude of different things whether it's small modular reactors, fuel fabrication, reprocessing fuel reprocessing, advanced manufacturing.

05:01There's a number of different companies doing it involved. It takes time, funding and serious collaboration to revive and modernize these sites into American energy hubs. What helps, according to DOE senior advisor Jim Kaler, is that the communities are accepting and even inviting of industrial development.

05:19I've been in the energy industry almost 20 years and two years ago any one of these projects would have been a world scale project that would have been written up and heavily covered by the media and now we're knocking them out on a fairly regular basis. Kaler says when complete the economic benefits and the energy abundance will be apparent.

05:36At all of our projects we're adding more power to the grid than is required by the project. So certainly it doesn't increase the cost of consumers in the area. It adds a bunch of local economic benefits. But at the end of all this we're going to end up with a more robust power system. Each of the local leaders representing communities with new American energy hubs say one thing is certain.

05:56Whatever the opportunity is, they want to be a part of it. Clean up with a purpose. It really brings the community back in to focus on, you know, making sure that we still have an important role just for the nation going forward.

06:13Progress, of course, comes with a price tag. Assistant Secretary Tim Walsh says his goal and the Trump administration's goal is to make the program a worthwhile investment for the American people. This is an eight billion dollar a year program. And what are the taxpayers getting for that eight billion dollars?

06:30They're getting a lot for that money. The sites are being cleaned up. And more importantly, the communities are being revitalized. And we're reinvigorating our industrial base. And we're back to building big things here in America. And again, big things that we really haven't built since when these sites were built back in the 1940s and 1950s.

06:53All eyes are locked on the Hanford site with excitement over a new approach that has the potential to accelerate cleanup by decades and its future as another American energy hub. Everybody that has a different opinion on Hanford really has the same goal in mind.

07:09And that's clean up as quickly as efficiently and as safely as possible. Ray Geimer, site manager at Hanford, knows the challenge as well. It's EM's largest site comprised of 586 square miles and 13,000 employees tasked with cleaning up the site that supported defense missions for nearly 50 years.

07:29The tri-party agreement that we're operating under is an agreement that was basically written 35 years ago based on what was known and existing at the time. On top of that, you've got the EPA who issued something called the third-third rule, which involved treatment standards for high-level waste, which was also in the 80s in which at the only time the only treatment standard was vitrification.

07:56Vitrification is the method of turning tank waste into glass, which removes 99.9% of its radioactivity and allows for its disposal. Over the years, technology has improved, revealing additional ways for scientists to remove the radioactivity before transport.

08:13Brout is one of those, and grout by itself doesn't work. It's all based on the separations technology, the pretreatment that we do, which is called the tankside cesium removal, which is basically an ion exchange process that removes all of the high activity waste, all of the cesium, a lot of the strontium, all the transuranics, all get removed in this pretreatment process, leaving basically a very benign final product.

08:39The grout strategy is being successfully used at EM Savannah Riversite. Assistant Secretary Tim Walsh submitted a proposal to the state of Washington in an attempt to get the grout strategy approved so the team at Hanford can neutralize more of its waste and get it out of Hanford quicker.

08:55We're 99.3% full in our double shelf tank, something like that. We're basically, we have no room to operate, and we're continuing to retrieve, and it's a very difficult process to try to retrieve and manage those tank waste with the tanks being as full as they are.

09:14If we could start just moving some of that tank waste out of there, and we're ready to do that as early as tomorrow, technically. Dave Brunert, EM's Chief Operating Officer, says if that problem can be solved, it opens the door to possibilities. Hanford is ripe with opportunity.

09:31It has opportunities not only to complete the restoration part of the mission, but the revitalization is fantastic. The opportunities are spectacular. There are huge opportunities for nuclear fuel reprocessing, and there's opportunities that I can't even imagine, but I know if we make this site available with power, with guards, guns, and gates, people, entrepreneurs, they will find ways to make it successful.