How did Oak Ridge become the ‘Silicon Valley of Nuclear?’ The AMSE Dirt Tour tells all.
The Nuclear Science Week 'Dirt Tour' by the American Museum of Science and Energy returned for year two with more companies, more facilities, and more dirt.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was the host site for the national Nuclear Science Week in 2025. One of the most popular events was the American Museum of Science and Energy (AMSE) Dirt Tour, organized by Matt Mullins, AMSE Director of Marketing and Communications.
The tour was exactly what it sounds like: a bus tour of the sites where new nuclear projects are taking shape in Oak Ridge. Last year, that meant a lot of dirt and a lot of imagination. But things have progressed in Oak Ridge since then.
While Oak Ridge is not the 2026 host site of Nuclear Science Week, this year’s Dirt Tour was even bigger, with more companies, new sites and visible construction.
At each stop on the road tour, a company representative boarded the bus to talk for ten minutes about the projects, timelines, investments, and impacts their company is making in East Tennessee.
Which companies boarded the bus?
Centrus Energy | Dennis Yates, Site Director
Centrus Energy (NYSE: LEU) plans to hire 430 people and invest a total of $560 million in East Tennessee by 2030. According to Dennis Yates, the company is expanding facilities and manufacturing capacity on its 80-acre campus. Right now, they manufacture centrifuge parts on-site and ship the parts to their facility in Piketon, Ohio, for assembly.
“Our primary focus right now is enriching high-assay low-enriched uranium or HALEU, and we hope to begin production in 2029 and reach full-scale production by 2032,” Yates shared. “The maximum production rate that we are trying to achieve here at Oak Ridge is 200 centrifuge sets per month.”
Type One Energy | Patrick Ellis, Director of Business Development
Patrick Ellis boarded the bus to talk about Type One Energy’s big plans to develop a fusion facility at the Bull Run Energy Complex in Clinton. So far, the company employs about 295 employees and has established a corporate headquarters in Hardin Valley.
Type One Energy’s development plan comes in two phases:
- Infinity One is an engineering test bed and workforce-training facility targeted for 2029
- Infinity Two is a 400-megawatt power plant targeted for 2034.
“We are actually going to break ground on both of those projects within the next year simultaneously,” Ellis said.
ORETTC/Y-12 | Mary Lin, ORETTC Director and Taz Painter, Y-12 Communications Manager
The Oak Ridge Enhanced Technology and Training Center supports the Emergency Response Training Facility. Inside the building, Y-12 conducts a number of trainings – and during the bus tour, the training focused on an emergency response to radiological incidents.
“We invited local law enforcement, security officers, the fire departments, medics, and paid actors to come and run through training scenarios,” Mary Lin explained. “Sometimes these are real run-throughs, and other times we use technology like XR, AR, and VR for high-hazard training situations.”
Taz Painter explained Y-12’s historical role in the East Tennessee community and nation.
“We have three primary missions: global security, nuclear deterrent, and nuclear navy,” Painter said. “This training today in helping people recognize materials and understand how to respond to them is part of the global security mission.”
Additionally, Painter explained, Y-12 ensures a safe, effective nuclear deterrent and makes canned subassemblies for nuclear weapons, as well as supplies the feedstock for the nuclear navy.
Orano USA | Curtis Roberts, VP Communications
Orano USA is developing Project IKE, a $5 billion commercial uranium enrichment facility on a 624-acre site in Oak Ridge. The 750,000-square-foot plant is being designed to produce low-enriched uranium or LEU for commercial nuclear reactors. Construction is slated to begin in 2027, with commercial production projected to kick off in 2031.
The company has reported its plans to create more than 1,000 construction jobs and more than 300 permanent operational positions in Oak Ridge over the next several years.
Triso-X | Cristy Allen, Communications Specialist
At Triso-X’s 180-acre fuel campus, Cristy Allen outlined the company’s plans. The company is building TX-1, a facility that will supply fuel for 11 of X-Energy’s (NASDAQ: XE) reactors, and its next facility, TX-2, to support 44 reactors.
“Right now, we are operating under a CRADA at the Oak Ridge National Lab. We’ve been there since 2016, so that’s where all of the fuel was developed, and so it’s been a really great partnership with them,” Allen said. “TX-1 will employ 400 people, and TX-2 will employ a little over 1,000.”
BWXT | Michael Tesar, Enrichment Program Director
Michael Tesar joined the bus tour to talk about BWXT’s new 65,000-square-foot site that opened in January: the Centrifuge Manufacturing Development Facility (CMDF). The facility will be used for prototyping, engineering, and improving economical, high-rate manufacturing methods for advanced gas centrifuge machines.
As Tesar explained, the building sits on a 100-acre property and supports around 100 highly skilled employees, with plans to continue to scale up over the next several years.
LIS Technologies | Lloyd Jollay, COO
LIS Technologies Inc. is building its patented Laser Isotope Separation technology in Oak Ridge. In January, the company announced the closure of its fourth fundraising round at $17 million, bringing the company’s total raise to date to over $64 million.
Lloyd Jollay said LIST also acquired the 206-acre duct island, and plans to build out a full campus for its phase three pilot plant – LIST Island.
Today, the company has 30 full-time team members, but the company is eager to hire more talented people to its growing team.
Standard Nuclear | Brian Ade, VP Engineering
Standard Nuclear (NYSE: STDN) is a TRISO fuel manufacturer for next-generation advanced nuclear reactors, small modular reactors (SMRs), and microreactors. Currently, they employ about 150 people across the country, with about 100 based in Oak Ridge.
“X-Energy makes their own fuel. Kairos makes their own fuel. But there’s a bunch of other companies around the U.S. that don’t have the capacity to make thier own fuel, and so that’s the market we’re serving,” Brian Ade said on the tour bus.
Recently, the Oak Ridge facility produced about 100 kilograms of TRISO fuel for Radiant Nuclear, which Ade said was shipped to Idaho for a demonstration reactor.
Kairos Power | Dr. Mike McGuire, VP Operations and Site Delivery
Dr. Mike McGuire hopped aboard the bus to drive through the Kairos Power campus in the East Tennessee Technology Park, showing off the company’s on-site Engineering Test Unit (ETU 3.0), construction site for Hermes 1, and planned site for Hermes 2.
Most of Kairos Power’s reactor components are precast in Albuquerque, New Mexico, then shipped to Tennessee for assembly.
“We’re not building a nuclear reactor out here. We’re actually assembling a nuclear reactor, and I think that’s the distinctive commercial advantage we have here,” he said. “And, our goal is not to assemble just one reactor; it’s to build 100 more of these and see them all across the country,” McGuire added.
On the tour, he explained Kairos’s modular reactor-development approach.
“Our company is built around the idea that the way you succeed is to iteratively build something, see if it breaks, improve it, and build it again,” he said.
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Clinch River Site
In a huge headline for the state, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is preparing to build the nation’s first commercial GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 SMR at the Clinch River Nuclear Site. If successful, the plant would produce enough power to serve about 240,000 homes.
The Dirt Tour had the opportunity to drive through the 950-acre site and see the planned placement for the reactor. If timelines are met, the projected date for full commercial operation is somewhere in the early-to-mid 2030s.
Energy Solutions | Brian Parsons, General Manager
EnergySolutions, also known as the Bear Creek Processing and Recycling Facility, is a hub for treating radioactive waste. It employs more than 200 people and has been a staple in the international nuclear industry for more than 40 years.
According to Brian Parsons, the comapny has three main ways to process waste:
- Incineration (200 to 1 volume reduction).
- Super compaction with 10 million pounds of force.
- Metal melt for beneficial reuse.
Once the material is processed, reduced in size, and potential radioactivity mitigated, it is shipped back to the city, state, or nation it came from.
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