The U.S. Department of Energy announced that its Office of Environmental Management will be renamed the Office of Nuclear Restoration & Revitalization to better reflect its mission, agency officials said at the 12th National Cleanup Workshop.
Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Tim Walsh said the rebranding reflects the agency's transition from primarily remediation work to site redevelopment. Private companies have committed more than $650 billion in investments at or adjacent to former cleanup sites for research, energy production, computing infrastructure, and innovation, Walsh said.
At the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, companies SoftBank and SB Energy announced plans to invest $500 billion over five years to build a new innovation center with 10 gigawatts of power generation capacity and the world's most powerful computing campus, according to Walsh.
The agency also reported progress on cleanup activities across the nuclear weapons complex. In 2025, the Hanford Site in Washington achieved the first reduction in tank waste levels since the 1940s after implementing a dual glass-and-grout strategy for waste treatment. Walsh said the approach has the potential to save taxpayers over $100 billion and reduce cleanup timelines by decades.
At the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, crews processed more than 13 million gallons of tank waste, with Savannah River National Laboratory projected to yield more than $150 billion in lifecycle cleanup savings. At Oak Ridge in Tennessee, the site is accelerating demolitions of aging infrastructure to clear space for national security and research missions while eliminating the nation's inventory of uranium-233, according to the agency.
The Idaho Cleanup Project is accelerating demolitions for the Office of Naval Reactors, with workers completing more than 40 percent of tank-waste cleanup work at that site, the agency said. In New Mexico, infrastructure upgrades at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant enhanced worker safety, and crews completed 82 transuranic waste shipments there in fiscal 2026, a 91 percent increase over the previous year, according to the agency.