Luther “Sunny” Miller is nearly 80, but in his younger days, he worked at Aerojet, a rocket and missile manufacturer located quite literally in his backyard. He can’t prove it, but he worries that his thyroid and bladder problems, and his wife’s kidney disease, can be traced to the plant.
Last year, national nuclear supplier BWX Technologies purchased the factory in Jonesborough, Tennessee and announced plans for significant expansion. The new facility will convert depleted uranium oxide supplied by the Department of Energy into high-purity depleted uranium. The 10-year, $1.6 billion contract will supply the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the material needed to maintain the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Despite the company’s promise to bring 175 permanent jobs to the area, Miller and many neighbors were left irate.
“They’re going to turn over the most beautiful parts of Tennessee into a nuclear waste area,” Miller said.
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But for others, the promise of jobs is what makes a nuclear “renaissance” centered around the nearby city of Oak Ridge in East Tennessee so promising. BWXT’s planned buildout is part of what state officials hope will be an economic revival driven by a renewal of the Manhattan Project’s legacy. Billions of dollars are already flowing into a region whose experience and expertise in nuclear energy and weapons development make it especially attractive to the industry.
Now Tennessee is among five finalists for a Department of Energy “nuclear lifecycle innovation campus” that could make it the centerpiece of a federal plan to finally deal with what’s left behind after splitting atoms to generate electricity. But the history that makes the Volunteer State so attractive a contender is marked by contamination, illnesses, and accidents, leaving some wary of what a renaissance might bring.
Nuclear waste is a logistical and public relations nightmare. Spent fuel, which remains radioactive for millenia, eventually finds its way into secure concrete containers. It remains there indefinitely because there is nowhere else to put it. The federal government has long wanted to build a permanent repository deep underground, but the only serious candidate, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, stalled amid political and public opposition. With the Trump administration hoping to quadruple nuclear energy output, solving this problem is increasingly urgent given that the nation’s 85 interim storage sites already hold more than 86,000 tons of radioactive waste, or just about enough to fill a football field nearly 10 yards deep.
The Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses are the latest attempt to address that problem. Rather than foist a site on an unwilling community, the Department of Energy invited states to volunteer as potential hosts. These industrial centers would support far more than waste storage. They would include uranium enrichment and fuel fabrication, reprocessing and recycling of spent fuel, and even energy generation. But federal officials said waste management would anchor the project. In July, Tennessee joined Utah, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Idaho as the five states selected to continue discussions with DOE.
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Tennessee’s advantage in that competition dates back more than 80 years to the end of World War II and the dawn of the nuclear age. The federal government chose Oak Ridge, at the time a remote southern Appalachian farming community, as a key site for the Manhattan Project.
BWXT president of operations Ronald Daily said that the company, and others like it, is building on the region’s history of contributing to national energy security and defense. “Appalachia was key to the US developing a defense power in a time frame like no other because of the industrious nature of the people of Appalachia,” he said.
Oak Ridge’s rural feel has given way to a concrete sprawl hosting a mismatched array of museums, highway-exit chains, and top-secret facilities. Federal buildings sit alongside private companies of all kinds hoping to get a little shine from the area’s legion of talented engineers. All of it is dotted by verdant public lands.
For those at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this moment is a chance to leverage its expertise for the continued local and national public good.
“Part of Oak Ridge’s role is that we have expertise in all parts of that fuel cycle,” said Joe Hoagland, a physical chemist and associate laboratory director of the laboratory’s Fusion and Fission Energy and Science Directorate. “We know how to enrich it. We know how to use it. We know how to store it. We know how to transport it and we understand the chemistries around how to recycle it.”
For many years, Hoagland said, East Tennessee was home to a handful of legacy companies like GE and Westinghouse, which created technologies for traditional utilities. But these days, it looks a lot more like startup culture, he said, because growing demand for electricity, he said, “creates an opportunity for others to get in the energy game.”
