Knoxville’s nuclear workshop opens with a full house and a long to-do list

The East Tennessee Economic Council's Nuclear Opportunities Workshop opened yesterday morning at the Knoxville Convention Center, drawing registrants from around the country and will close later today following a packed lineup of policy and industry leaders.

Day one, themed "From Strategy to Deployment," opened with congressional perspectives from U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann and video remarks from Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, followed by the National Nuclear Security Administration's Brandon Williams on what's at stake for national security. The afternoon ran through the fuel cycle: an advanced reactor panel with Radiant, Kairos Power, GE Vernova Hitachi, Westinghouse, and NuScale; an enrichment and fabrication session featuring Orano USA, Centrus, TRISO-X, LIS Technologies, and Standard Nuclear; and a spotlight on recycling used fuel with Oklo and the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy. The day closed with a panel asking whether the self-declared U.S. epicenter for nuclear will actually deliver.

Today turns to "Innovation, Workforce, and What's Next": fusion's path from physics to power markets; a fireside chat on the Genesis Mission with ORNL director Stephen Streiffer and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's nuclear policy advisor Jason Remer, a data-center panel with AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Nvidia, and Microsoft; Tennessee Valley Authority interim president Mike Skaggs on the "deployment decade"; and back-to-back sessions on workforce demand and supply. Nuclear Regulatory Commission advanced reactor engineering director Mehdi Reisi Fard will close out the day with a discussion on accelerating deployment.

The DOE timed news to this occasion, with its Office of Environmental Management using Tuesday morning to highlight its American Energy Hubs initiative, which is converting former Manhattan Project and Cold War sites into industrial ground. DOE-EM has transferred more than 2,500 acres in Oak Ridge for economic reuse, with hundreds more expected.

"Our work is transforming sites that were instrumental in powering and protecting our nation decades ago," DOE-EM Assistant Secretary Tim Walsh said, "and making it possible for them to do it again."

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who has about five months left in office, used his time to make the state's case, saying Tennessee is "the place that we genuinely believe has become the global epicenter of the new nuclear renaissance." Since 2019, he said, the state has landed 11 major nuclear projects worth roughly $7 billion and 2,000 jobs, with some 40,000 Tennesseans now working in the industry. The Nuclear Energy Fund he launched in 2023 has allocated $95 million. Tennessee is also a finalist for a DOE Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus.

But Lee spent most of his time on people, not projects. Every company weighing an investment, he said, asks the same two questions: "Do you have enough power, and do you have enough workers?" He brought up Deniece Thomas, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development, for a fireside chat on labor question. "Business is our partner," Thomas said of the state's approach. "This is not a program, it's a posture."

Lee's own summary was more direct: "We can't live on the past," he said. "We have to be investing in the future."