Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is about to reclaim a role it hasn’t held in decades: home to a major new uranium enrichment facility on American soil. In June 2026, the city’s Industrial Development Board finalized a development agreement with Orano USA for a 624-acre site known as Self-Sufficiency Parcel 2, clearing the way for a gas centrifuge plant that carries a projected $5 billion capital investment, a footprint of roughly 750,000 square feet, and an estimated 1,000-plus jobs.
The project, which Orano has named Project IKE, would be the first large-scale commercial enrichment facility built in the United States since the Louisiana Energy Services plant (now Orano’s own facility) opened in Eunice, New Mexico, in 2010. It lands at a moment when Washington is scrambling to wean the country off Russian nuclear fuel, and it puts Oak Ridge back at the center of a supply chain the city helped create during the Manhattan Project era.
The deal on paper
The IDB’s public notice spells out the basic mechanics. The 624-acre parcel, part of the former K-29 gaseous diffusion complex that enriched uranium during the Cold War, will transfer first from the U.S. Department of Energy to the IDB and then to Orano USA under a previously approved development agreement. Board resolutions adopted in early April 2026 authorize the chair and vice-chair to execute access agreements and lock in the sequencing of those land transfers.
Project IKE would produce low-enriched uranium, or LEU, the fuel that powers the vast majority of the world’s commercial nuclear reactors. Orano USA is a subsidiary of Orano S.A., the French state-controlled nuclear fuel company that already operates the only commercial centrifuge enrichment plant in the U.S. at its Eunice, New Mexico, site. The Oak Ridge facility would significantly expand the company’s American production capacity.
Federal dollars behind the push
The project does not exist in a vacuum. Congress passed the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act in 2024, cutting off a supplier that controlled roughly 44 percent of global enrichment capacity, according to World Nuclear Association data. That ban forced the federal government to accelerate plans for domestic alternatives…