PIKETON, Ohio — The U.S. Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site is moving from decades of Cold War-era cleanup into a new phase as the centerpiece of a $37 billion energy and computing hub, according to the department’s Office of Environmental Management.
Crews are now tearing down former uranium enrichment buildings on the Piketon site to clear ground for the project, which combines large-scale power generation with a planned super intelligence computing center, the agency said in a release detailing the effort, as reported by the Scioto Valley Guardian.
Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Tim Walsh, who oversees the Portsmouth Site and has met with workers there, said the project is meant to turn the site’s environmental liabilities into a long-term economic asset for southern Ohio, according to the department.
The Portsmouth Site is one of three Department of Energy properties nationally — along with sites in Paducah, Kentucky, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee — being redeveloped as what the department calls American Energy Hubs, drawing a combined $650 billion in private investment across the three locations, the release said.
The department has framed the Piketon project as the nation’s largest energy megasite, and the figures attached to it have grown. Walsh toured the site in October and touted a $33 billion plan; the department now puts the investment at $37 billion, according to the Scioto Valley Guardian’s report on the release.
The Portsmouth Site’s history runs back to the Cold War, when the Piketon plant enriched uranium for the nation’s weapons and energy programs. Generations of Pike County workers have staffed the site through its production years and the long cleanup that followed, and the demolition now under way is the most visible sign yet that the property’s next chapter is industrial rather than remedial.
The department said demolishing the old Cold War buildings is intended to create career opportunities for future generations in the region as the site transitions from cleanup to reindustrialization. For Pike County and its neighbors — Jackson, Ross and Scioto counties among them — a hub of that scale would rank among the largest economic projects in southern Ohio history.
What happens next is the build-out itself: continued demolition to clear the megasite, followed by the power generation and computing construction the department describes. The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is overseeing the Portsmouth transition, and its release presents the demolition work now under way as the clearing step that makes the rest possible.
Photo: U.S. Department of Energy, public domain — industrial structures at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon.