PIKETON, Ohio — The U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce announced Friday a public-private partnership with SoftBank and AEP Ohio to build one of the largest energy and artificial intelligence complexes in the country on the grounds of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County — a federal site that has been under environmental cleanup and is still not finished.
The project, officially named the PORTS Technology Campus, would include 9.2 gigawatts of new natural gas generation and a 10-gigawatt data center development on DOE land. SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary, is also investing $4.2 billion with AEP Ohio to upgrade and build new transmission lines in the region. The DOE says construction is expected to begin this year.
The announcement confirms what the administration had not previously acknowledged: the $33 billion gas plant is being built to power an AI data center campus. SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son said it plainly in the DOE’s own press release: “AI will transform every industry, and the PORTS Technology Campus will help deliver the next-generation infrastructure needed to unlock those breakthroughs.”
The gas generation is financed entirely by Japan under a $550 billion U.S.-Japan trade deal. SoftBank holds no equity in the plant and would collect developer fees over 15 to 20 years. The company has already placed a $10 billion order for nearly 170 gas turbines from GE Vernova.
The announcement makes Pike County ground zero for one of the largest concentrations of proposed energy infrastructure investment anywhere in the United States — and it is all landing on contaminated federal land in a rural Appalachian community that has never been made whole for what the last round of federal ambition did to it.
What’s being proposed for a single site in Piketon
The gas megaplant and data center campus are not arriving in a vacuum. They are being layered onto the same former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant property, where at least three other major energy projects have been announced in recent months. Not one of them has broken ground. The site itself has not been fully remediated.
The DOE press release frames the project as delivering “lower electricity costs across the region” and compliance with President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which the administration says protects ratepayers from paying for energy infrastructure needed to power the AI boom. AEP Ohio Chairman Bill Fehrman said the partnership “unlocks billions of dollars of electric transmission infrastructure, all without increasing customer rates.”
But lower electricity costs and not increasing rates are not the same as building power for the community. The press release makes clear that the 9.2 gigawatts of generation will “provide power to a new 10 GW data center development.” The pledge that excess capacity would be “made available to the grid” does not guarantee how much excess there would be, at what price, or for how long.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright framed the project around AI dominance: “By bringing new power online and upgrading our existing infrastructure, this investment supports the AI boom and cutting-edge technologies while strengthening our energy system.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called the project a result of “President Trump’s America First trade policies” and a step toward “reindustrializing the country.”
Neither secretary mentioned the contamination history of the site. Neither mentioned RECA. Neither mentioned the community’s health.
Also announced for the same PORTS redevelopment zone is a proposed 1.2 GW nuclear power campus from Oklo Inc. and Meta. Oklo purchased 206 acres of land at the PORTS reserve for nearly $5.15 million in December 2025. According to the company’s own annual report filed with the SEC on March 17, 2026, the land is not currently developed.
The project faces fundamental regulatory hurdles that no announcement or press conference can bypass. Oklo submitted a combined license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March 2020. The NRC denied it without prejudice in 2022, identifying additional information it required. As of the date of filing, Oklo has not resubmitted an updated application. The company’s 10-K states directly that “it is uncertain when, if at all, we will obtain NRC approvals for the design, construction, and operation of any of our powerhouses.” The filing further acknowledges that no commercial nuclear reactor that is not water-cooled is currently operating in the United States under an NRC or DOE license, and that no advanced fission technology has been approved for commercial operation by either agency.
Oklo has never built a reactor. It has never generated a single watt of electricity. It has never entered into a binding power purchase agreement with any customer. The company reported a net loss of $105.7 million in 2025, total operating expenses of $139.3 million with zero revenue, and an accumulated deficit of $240.8 million. It raised more than $1.2 billion in stock sales in 2025 alone to fund operations. Its own risk factors warn that the company’s “financial condition, commercial plans, and results of operation are likely to be materially and adversely affected” if NRC approvals are not obtained or if the process takes significantly longer or costs more than expected.
The January 2026 prepayment agreement with Meta provides a mechanism for Meta to prepay for power and provide funding to advance deployment. Oklo will use Meta’s money to secure nuclear fuel for the first phase. That is the extent of what has been formalized. The campus, if it clears regulatory approval and is actually built, would be designed specifically to power Meta’s data centers — not the homes or businesses of Pike County.
Centrus Energy has announced a major expansion of commercial-scale production of High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium at the Piketon plant. The company says the investment will generate 1,000 construction jobs and 300 new operating jobs. What the company does not advertise is what the DOE’s own Inspector General found last July. A four-year audit concluded that the original HALEU demonstration contract that brought Centrus to Piketon was awarded through a process that inappropriately limited competition, bypassed federal contracting rules, and went to a company with significant financial risks and negative equity at the time of the award.
The DOE had previously invested approximately $397 million in Centrus before the company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014. Despite that history, the DOE signed a memorandum of understanding with Centrus in 2018 that the Inspector General said effectively set up a sole-source award before there was a formal notice of intent or a contract in place. The IG’s audit found that the DOE crafted requirements so restrictive that only Centrus could fulfill them, then awarded the contract to a company that a subsequent financial review confirmed did not have adequate resources to perform it. The Inspector General concluded the sole-source contract “may not have been in the Government’s best interest.”
Trillium H2 Power has announced plans for a hydrogen power facility at the same redevelopment zone. The project’s foundation is built on DOE land transfers that the Ohio EPA has publicly challenged. The state agency accused the DOE of providing “false and misleading information” about contamination levels on the parcels being transferred for development. One parcel, initially marketed by the DOE as “uncontaminated,” was found by the Ohio EPA to contain contamination well above safe levels. Under pressure, the DOE was forced to reduce that parcel from more than 200 acres to 78 acres. Another parcel was transferred for $10 with a deed that restricts land use to commercial and industrial only, prohibits groundwater use for drinking, and requires vapor intrusion evaluations for any new construction — restrictions that exist because the contamination has not been resolved.
Trillium’s “blue hydrogen” technology relies on natural gas with carbon capture, a process that environmental groups have criticized as perpetuating fossil fuel dependence while generating significant emissions. No construction has begun on the Trillium facility.
To be clear about where things stand: apart from the gas turbine order, none of these projects have materialized beyond announcements, memorandums of understanding, land purchases, and press conferences. All of them are proposed for a site that is not finished being cleaned up.
The ground beneath all of it
The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant was built in the early 1950s to produce enriched uranium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program and later for commercial nuclear reactors. It sits on approximately 3,777 acres in rural Pike County. The enrichment complex itself covers roughly 1,200 of those acres. Weapons-grade enrichment was eventually suspended. Gaseous diffusion operations shut down in 2001.
Cleanup started in 1989 under the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, working alongside the U.S. EPA and the Ohio EPA. Thirty-six years later, it is still going.
The DOE’s press release Friday included a single bullet point claiming the project would advance “environmental cleanup and remediation” and “revitalization of the Portsmouth site, that for decades played a pivotal role in our nation’s security.” Assistant Secretary of Environmental Management Tim Walsh called it “a major step forward.”
What the press release did not say is what the cleanup has actually found. Decades of operations left behind widespread radioactive and chemical contamination — uranium, technetium-99, PCBs, trichloroethylene, asbestos, and hydrogen fluoride gas — that seeped into the soil, the groundwater, and the air that residents breathed. In 2019, Zahn’s Corner Middle School was abruptly closed after neptunium-237, an enriched uranium byproduct, was detected just two miles from the plant. Students had to be relocated. The discovery directly contradicted official assurances that the surrounding area was safe.
The Scioto Valley Guardian and community advocates have spent years documenting elevated cancer rates, chronic illness, and death among residents who lived in the shadow of the facility. Families in Pike County have buried their loved ones and watched their neighbors get sick at rates that cannot be explained by coincidence.
Despite that evidence — and despite the federal government’s own environmental data confirming the contamination — Pike County has been systematically shut out of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. Congress has repeatedly failed to extend RECA coverage to this community. The people who lived with the consequences of America’s nuclear weapons program have received no recognition, no compensation, and no acknowledgment that what was done to them was wrong.
And now the same government that will not compensate the people it already harmed is asking them to accept a $33 billion gas megaplant, a 10-gigawatt AI data center, a hydrogen facility, two nuclear reactors, and expanded uranium enrichment — all on the same ground.
What the gas plant would put in the air
No air quality permits have been filed for the Portsmouth Powered Land Project. But at 9.2 gigawatts, the scale of what is being proposed demands attention.
A natural gas facility of that size would be one of the largest single-source emitters of air pollutants in the country. Natural gas combustion produces nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and carbon dioxide. At full capacity, the annual emissions footprint would dwarf anything currently operating in southern Ohio.
Consider this: the ALTIVIA Petrochemicals plant in neighboring Scioto County — one of the region’s existing industrial emitters — is authorized to release more than 600 tons of regulated pollutants per year under a single wastewater treatment permit. That is one permit covering one unit at one facility. The proposed SoftBank gas plant would operate at a scale many times larger than the entire ALTIVIA complex.
No environmental impact assessment has been made public. No water use or cooling infrastructure plans have been disclosed, despite the facility’s proximity to the Ohio River. No public comment period has been announced for any aspect of the project. The DOE press release made no mention of air quality, emissions, or environmental review.
Whether any of it can actually be built
The DOE says construction is expected to begin this year. Energy analysts are not as certain.
Gas turbines in the United States are effectively sold out through 2029 or 2030. PJM Interconnection, the largest regional grid operator in the country and the system this plant would need to connect to, said it was not aware of the project before the February announcement. PJM had no information beyond the Commerce Department fact sheet. No interconnection application had been filed at the time. The grid operator is currently working through a backlog of applications that have been waiting since 2022.
No siting or construction permits have been filed with Ohio regulators. The plant would need new pipeline infrastructure to deliver natural gas to the facility, which would require additional state and potentially federal approvals on top of everything else.
Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Canary Media this week that he doubts the project will be built at the scale described. He pointed to supply chain constraints, competition for skilled labor already in high demand from data center and energy projects across the country, and the sheer complexity of a project this size.
Then there is the trade deal itself. Three days after the gas plant was announced in February, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the broad tariff program the Trump administration used to extract trade concessions from Japan and other countries. The validity of the new tariffs remains undetermined. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has since launched investigations into what the administration calls unfair trade practices by Japan. If the tariff framework collapses, the leverage that produced Japan’s $550 billion investment commitment could go with it — and so could the financial basis for the Portsmouth Powered Land Project.
A concentration of risk with no public security plan
There is another dimension to what is being proposed in Piketon that no official has publicly addressed: security.
If everything announced for this site were actually built, Pike County would house a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas megaplant, a 10-gigawatt AI data center campus, a hydrogen power facility, two nuclear reactors, a uranium enrichment operation, and the infrastructure connecting all of it to the nation’s largest power grid. A nuclear facility, a uranium processing operation, a massive fossil fuel combustion plant, a hydrogen installation, and one of the largest data center campuses in the world — side by side — in a rural Appalachian community with no military installation, no major law enforcement hub, and limited first-responder capacity.
No publicly disclosed security assessment exists for the cumulative risk of co-locating this many high-value energy and technology assets in a single place. Each facility on its own would be classified as critical infrastructure under federal guidelines. Together they would represent one of the most strategically significant — and potentially vulnerable — complexes anywhere in the country.
Pike County has a population of roughly 28,000 people. The county seat of Waverly has fewer than 4,000. Local law enforcement and emergency services are built for a rural community. They are not built for the protection of a multi-billion-dollar energy and AI campus handling nuclear materials and enough natural gas generation capacity to power seven million homes.
A disruption at any one of these facilities — whether from a natural disaster, an industrial accident, or a deliberate act — could cascade into the others. A fire or explosion at a gas plant operating alongside a nuclear reactor, a uranium enrichment facility, and a data center storing nationally significant computing infrastructure is not hypothetical. It is a scenario that federal planners are supposed to assess before construction begins, not after.
No such assessment has been shared with the public. No community briefing on emergency preparedness for a complex of this scale has been announced. No evacuation plan for a rural county with limited road infrastructure has been disclosed. The DOE press release made no mention of security.
Washington is asking Pike County to become one of the most critical energy and technology nodes in the United States. Nobody has told the people who live there what that means for their safety.
Three cabinet secretaries and a golden shovel
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son will arrive in Piketon this afternoon for a ceremonial groundbreaking at the DOE Portsmouth site.
What the community is still owed
Pike County has given more to the federal government’s energy ambitions than most communities in the country. Its residents enriched uranium for America’s nuclear arsenal. They lived with the contamination that followed. They buried their family members. They compiled the evidence. They made the case. And they were told no.
RECA has never covered Pike County. Not because the contamination didn’t happen — the federal government’s own records prove it did. Not because people didn’t get sick — the cancer clusters and death records speak for themselves. But because Congress chose not to act, and administration after administration chose not to push.
Billions of dollars are about to flow into the same site that poisoned the community around it — to build an AI campus that will power the future of artificial intelligence for Silicon Valley, funded by Japan, operated by a company headquartered in Houston, on land the federal government contaminated and has spent years and billions of taxpayer dollars cleaning up.
The question isn’t whether Pike County can handle more development. The jobs are needed. It’s whether the federal government has the decency to make things right with the people it already broke before it comes back asking for more.
This is a developing story. The Scioto Valley Guardian will continue to update this report as additional details from today’s event become available.