PIKETON, Ohio — The press release arrived Monday morning with the measured optimism of a company that has learned to speak fluently in the language of inevitability.
Oklo Inc. (NYSE: OKLO) and Centrus Energy Corp. (NYSE: LEU) announced they have “agreed to pursue discussions” about a joint venture to build a deconversion hub for high-assay low-enriched uranium — what the industry calls HALEU — at Centrus’s existing facility in Pike County. The announcement spoke of efficiency gains, supply chain synergies, domestic energy independence, and the transformation of “thousands of acres” at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant into a hub for clean energy.
What the release did not mention: the last time Pike County hosted a nuclear expansion project, the community was left with generations of cancer and contamination.
A Community That Has Heard This Before
We have spent years documenting what can only be described as a “decades-long saga of environmental negligence, systemic regulatory failure, and a web of culpability” at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant — a facility that has left Pike County bearing some of the highest cancer and mortality rates in the state of Ohio.
A study by epidemiologist Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health Project found significant increases in cancer, infant mortality, and premature deaths in areas downwind of the Portsmouth plant. From 2021 to 2023, Pike County’s premature death rate for those under 74 years old was 107% higher than the national average, up from 85% in the period from 2017 to 2020.
The plant at the center of this crisis — the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, or PORTS — enriched uranium on this same ground from 1954 until 2001. It used recycled uranium containing neptunium-237, technetium, and plutonium as feedstock. Plutonium was first detected by scientists at the plant as early as 1955. An independent study led by Dr. Michael Ketterer, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, confirmed the presence of neptunium-237 — a byproduct of uranium enrichment with a half-life of 2.1 million years — in plants growing near the facility.
The School That Never Reopened
The community’s relationship with federal nuclear promises reached its lowest point in May 2019, when Zahn’s Corner Middle School in Piketon was closed after enriched uranium was detected inside the building and neptunium-237 was detected by an air monitor directly next to it.
Independent scientists determined, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, that the implied source of the neptunium-237 at Zahn’s Corner was fugitive dust emissions from the nuclear facility — not, as the Department of Energy initially suggested, atmospheric fallout from nuclear weapons tests conducted decades earlier. The DOE’s own air monitors had been detecting neptunium near the school since 2017, two years before closure.
Multiple students in the surrounding Scioto Valley Local School District were diagnosed with cancer; several sadly passed away. The school never reopened for students. It was later auctioned off — sold as-is, contamination and all, to a local church with direct ties to the atomic plant.
Now, Oklo plans a “1.2 GW power campus,” and frames Centrus’s Piketon facility as the cornerstone of a new domestic fuel supply chain.
What Centrus Doesn’t Say About Its Own Record
The press release describes Centrus President and CEO Amir Vexler as committed to “laying the groundwork to rebuild the U.S. nuclear fuel-cycle capacity.” What it omits is that Centrus’s existing HALEU operation at Piketon has already drawn scrutiny from the federal government’s own watchdog.
A Department of Energy Office of Inspector General report released in July 2025 found that the Office of Nuclear Energy had steered a sole-source HALEU contract to Centrus’s American Centrifuge Operating subsidiary despite clear procurement rules requiring competition. The audit found that nuclear energy officials “bypassed contracting rules outlined in the Federal Acquisition Regulation” and used a pre-award memorandum of understanding to lock Centrus in as the only viable provider before any public solicitation occurred.
The OIG report’s findings about Centrus’s financial condition at the time of that original award are striking. At award time in 2019, Centrus’s total debt was “significantly greater than its total assets,” with negative equity and an inability to pay short-term obligations from assets readily convertible to cash. The company, in other words, was awarded a sole-source government contract despite being financially insolvent by standard measures — a contract the OIG concluded had been effectively pre-arranged through a memorandum of understanding signed months before any formal solicitation.
Centrus’s present-day balance sheet is considerably stronger, though financial analysts still treat the company cautiously, as its stock price continues to show extreme volatility. But the pattern of federal co-dependence that the OIG described — government contracts awarded outside competitive norms, regulators granting rolling short-term extensions rather than long-term approvals — has not fundamentally changed.
“Discussions” About a Problem That Doesn’t Exist Yet
Read carefully, today’s Oklo-Centrus announcement is a press release about a conversation. The companies have “agreed to pursue discussions” about a “potential joint venture” that “would aim” to do things that “could” produce benefits — language so thoroughly hedged that the actual commitment approaches zero.
This matters because Oklo has not yet received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build or operate any reactor. The company’s first license application, submitted years ago, was formally rejected by the NRC, which cited significant information gaps in the company’s description of potential accidents and the classification of safety systems. The company is now in pre-application review for a new submission.
Oklo’s first phase of its planned Piketon power campus is not expected until 2030, with the full 1.2 gigawatt goal targeted for around 2034. Centrus Energy Pre-construction and site characterization were expected to begin this year.
The joint venture that Oklo and Centrus are announcing discussions about would serve reactors that don’t have licenses, built on a timeline that stretches nearly a decade, using a deconversion process that doesn’t yet have a licensed facility in the United States.
The Ohio EPA’s Warning, Still Unanswered
Meanwhile, the environmental remediation of the ground Oklo and Centrus want to build on remains deeply contested. In a letter dated December 31, 2024, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency accused the U.S. Department of Energy of providing false and misleading information about Parcel 4 at the Portsmouth site, criticizing the DOE’s Sampling and Analysis Plan for its lack of transparency, inadequate data, and misrepresentation of contamination levels. The Ohio EPA outlined 18 detailed comments, including concerns about the DOE’s characterization of the parcel as uncontaminated.
What Pike County Actually Needs
To be precise, there is nothing inherently dishonest about two companies announcing they intend to have conversations. The domestic HALEU supply chain is a genuine problem. The logic of co-locating enrichment and deconversion services is sound. Pike County, one of Ohio’s most economically distressed counties, has legitimate reasons to want private investment.
But Vina Colley, the founder of PRESS (Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security, who has been documenting contamination at the Portsmouth site for decades, has described the community’s dynamic with federal nuclear promises plainly: residents want jobs and economic recovery, but what they keep receiving is exposure and broken assurances.
Since 2020, the DOE has misrepresented contamination levels to state regulators, a contractor spilled 50,000 gallons of potentially radioactive water into local waterways, and cancer rates have continued to rise. Now, two companies with no operating reactors, no deconversion license, and a history of government-assisted contract awards are announcing that they plan to have discussions about expanding operations at the same site.
For some, the new nuclear renaissance in Piketon is essential to the county’s financial future. For others, it feels like a step back in time to the 1950s. The people of Pike County have seen this script before.