DOE exits NRC environmental review of Orano's Oak Ridge enrichment plant

The Department of Energy has dropped out of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's environmental review of Project IKE, the uranium enrichment plant Orano Enrichment USA wants to build in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In a September 17, 2026 email to NRC staff, Erik Olds, manager of DOE's Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, wrote: "We are identifying approaches to amend the SSP-2 deed more efficiently and rapidly for Orano's planned industrial and commercial use at Oak Ridge." As a result, he wrote, DOE no longer needs to be a cooperating agency on the NRC's environmental impact statement; he terminated the memorandum of understanding the agencies signed in April.

The deed was the reason DOE was in the review at all. The NRC's April 17 invitation reads: "Because of DOE's previous ownership of the proposed project property and continuing authority over whether to modify the property deed to allow construction and operation of a uranium enrichment facility, we are requesting DOE's participation as a cooperating agency." By Olds's account, the faster deed route is what makes DOE's seat in the review unnecessary. Zoning waits on the deed too: on September 30, Orano environmental engineer Greg Schwartz told NRC staff that further zoning "will have to go through the Industrial Development Board after the deed restrictions have been lifted, as I understand things."

Orano has filed the Information System Security Plan, for systems that handle classified information, that a May NRC staff exemption from 10 CFR 70.22(m) let it submit after the rest of the application. Its transmittal letter is dated September 21, the last day the exemption allowed, four months after the application's May 21 acceptance, a deadline our August 28 report flagged. The plan and its three companion enclosures are non-public. Also on September 21, the NRC capped the service fees it can charge Orano for the review: a fixed fee cap of $4,543,024, including staff hours and contractor costs, which rises only in cases of applicant failure.

Petitions to intervene are due 60 days after the NRC's August 12 Federal Register notice. That notice puts the plant's maximum enrichment at 8 weight-percent uranium-235; Orano's license application and the NRC's own June scoping notice say up to 10. Day 60 is Sunday, October 11, and the NRC's time rule carries a deadline that lands on a weekend or federal holiday to the next day that is neither, which by our count is Tuesday, October 13, after the Columbus Day holiday.