The Sixteen Sites, Up Close

A Correction Before We Begin

Part I named Oak Ridge and Savannah River as land “taken from Indigenous nations for the Manhattan Project.” That sentence is true at one layer of history and false at another, and the honest version is more important than the rhetorically tighter one.

The accurate framing is layered. Oak Ridge sits on land that was Overhill Cherokee and Yuchi territory before the 1791 Treaty of Holston ceded what is now Anderson County, Tennessee, to the United States. After cession, the land became Appalachian farming country — small communities named Elza, Robertsville, Scarboro, Wheat, East Fork, Bethel, Edgemoor. In October 1942 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a declaration of taking and acquired approximately 59,000 acres at an average price of $46.86 per acre. About 3,000 to 4,000 people were displaced. Many learned their land had been taken when their children came home from school with the message: go home and tell your parents you are going to have to find another place to live.

Savannah River Site sits on land that was historically Westo, Yuchi, and later Cherokee and Creek territory, ceded across the 18th century. By the time the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announced the site on November 28, 1950, the population was rural and white. Six small towns — Ellenton, Dunbarton, Meyers Mill, Hawthorne, Robbins, and Leigh — were absorbed. Six thousand people were uprooted. Six thousand graves were relocated. The deadline for Ellenton was March 1, 1952. The deadline for Dunbarton was April 1, 1952. The new community of New Ellenton was built just outside the wire.

The federal government, when it needs land fast, takes it from populations that cannot effectively resist. The legal mechanism is the same. The populations rotate.

The structural pattern is older and more important than any single demographic. Historically Indigenous nations, then rural Appalachian farmers, then small-town South Carolinians, now Indigenous nations again at Northern Cheyenne. The architecture is older than the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project is the name we give to one cycle of it.

What the Administration Is Saying On the Record

Before walking the two sites, it is worth quoting the administration's own officials on what they are doing, because the framing is not coming from me.

Acting Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Joel Bradburne, on the Oak Ridge solicitation:

“As one of the original Manhattan Project sites, Oak Ridge is now poised to play a role in what has been dubbed Manhattan Project 2.0 as the Department ushers in a golden era of American energy to fuel the AI race. This is the next step forward in the transformation from nuclear remediation site to nuclear renaissance hub.” Joel Bradburne — DOE, Sept 30, 2025

Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA Administrator Brandon Williams, on the Savannah River solicitation:

“Under President Trump's leadership, the work being carried out at NNSA to harness AI will have an impact on national security as the Manhattan Project did in the 1940s.” Brandon Williams — NNSA, Sept 30, 2025

Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil, also on Oak Ridge:

“This RFP represents more than a ground lease for AI data center development; it offers US companies a potential chance to anchor their partnership with one of our nation's greatest assets, our National Labs. From its Manhattan Project roots to its present leadership in advanced computing, Oak Ridge exemplifies the continuum of American innovation.” Darío Gil — DOE, Sept 30, 2025

Three senior officials. Three on-the-record statements. The Manhattan Project comparison is theirs, not the press's, not the critics'. The administration is publishing this framing in DOE press releases.

The continuum Gil names is real. The question Part II is built around is what the continuum actually contains.

Oak Ridge: The Solicitation

The Oak Ridge Reservation is 33,508 federally owned acres in Anderson and Roane counties, Tennessee. It is one of the four priority sites named in Part I — alongside Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Idaho National Laboratory, and Savannah River Site. The site houses Oak Ridge National Laboratory — home of the Frontier exascale supercomputer, currently among the fastest in the world — and the Y-12 National Security Complex, which produces and processes weapons-grade uranium and stores the nation's enriched uranium stockpile.

On September 30, 2025, the DOE Office of Environmental Management and Office of Science jointly issued Synopsis Solicitation DE-ORR-0037830 — Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure and Energy Generation on DOE Land at the Oak Ridge Reservation. The solicitation makes available two parcels:

The RFP specifies three configurations that proposals may take: integrated data center and energy projects, phased integrated AI data center and energy projects, and energy infrastructure projects. The RFP expresses a “strong preference” for innovative nuclear and geothermal generation sources. DOE will not provide financial support; applicants fund the entire build.

The RFP itself acknowledges the adverse impacts that have surfaced at other hyperscale sites. The Adverse Impacts appendix specifically names: increased energy consumption including potential increased costs to surrounding community and residential customers, grid harmonic issues, decreased grid stability, increased water consumption and water quality issues, increased pollution, radiation and radiological risk perception, thermal pollution, land use intensity changes, and disruption to nearby habitats and wildlife.

That language is in the federal government's own solicitation document. The administration is naming the harms before the projects are awarded. That is not a coincidence. It is legal cover for what is coming.

Oak Ridge: Who Is Circling

Proposals closed December 1, 2025. The Department has not publicly disclosed the applicants. That disclosure is expected during 2026 as leases are awarded.

What is publicly visible: the DOE Reactor Pilot Program selected eleven advanced nuclear companies in August 2025, including Valar Atomics, Terrestrial Energy, and Oklo. Three of those — Valar, Terrestrial, and Oklo — were also selected for the Advanced Nuclear Fuel Line Pilot. The Reactor Pilot Program target is at least three test reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026, using the DOE's own authorization process rather than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's.

This matters because it tells you who the reactor side of the equation will be — the eleven companies the DOE has already pre-selected for nuclear development are the natural pool of energy partners for any Oak Ridge AI applicant. Oklo, in particular, is publicly associated with Sam Altman, who served as its chairman until he stepped down on April 22, 2025, specifically to enable strategic partnerships with OpenAI and other AI hyperscalers. Oklo CEO and co-founder Jacob DeWitte now serves as Chairman. Oklo also maintains an active technical collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on advanced structural materials for its Aurora powerhouse under a DOE Voucher Program announced in February 2025 — meaning the company is not starting from zero at the site.

The data center side of the equation has been more opaque. Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Crusoe Energy have all publicly signaled interest in DOE-land AI infrastructure across 2025, though none has been confirmed as an applicant at Oak Ridge specifically.

What this article cannot do is name the Oak Ridge applicants. What it can do is identify the structural constraint: the awardee at Oak Ridge will almost certainly be a consortium combining a hyperscale data center operator with one or more of the eleven DOE-blessed reactor companies, financed by the DOE Loan Programs Office and/or the DOE Grid Deployment Office, and connected to TVA's existing transmission infrastructure. That narrows the universe significantly. The names will resolve in 2026.

Savannah River: The Solicitation

The Savannah River Site is 310 square miles in Aiken, Barnwell, and Allendale counties, South Carolina. It was the production complex that made plutonium and tritium for the U.S. hydrogen bomb arsenal from the early 1950s until the end of the Cold War. Five production reactors were built. The site is currently managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration through a contract with Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, a Fluor-led joint venture, expiring September 30, 2026.

On September 30, 2025, NNSA issued a Request for Proposals for Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure and Energy Generation on DOE Land at Savannah River Site. The RFP identifies ten tracts of land totaling 3,103 acres. DOE anticipates leasing 250 to 450 acres of the total. Proposals were due December 5, 2025.

The Savannah River RFP is notable for two reasons.

First, it is administered by NNSA — not the DOE Office of Science or Office of Environmental Management. NNSA is the agency responsible for the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. The fact that the AI infrastructure solicitation runs through the nuclear weapons agency rather than the science office is itself an organizational signal. It means the awardee will be operating on land actively managed for national security purposes, with the security clearance regime, the access controls, and the classification structure that come with it.

Second, the same Savannah River Site is also competing a separate $61.5 billion, 20-year management and operations contract. The current SRNS contract expires September 30, 2026. NNSA issued the M&O RFP on February 27, 2026, with submissions due May 12, 2026. The new M&O contract will run alongside whatever AI infrastructure leases are signed. The contractor running the site's existing nuclear weapons production work — including the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, scheduled for completion by 2035 to produce plutonium pits — will be the operational neighbor of any AI data center awardee.

That is worth holding. NNSA is competing two adjacent contracts on the same land: one to manage plutonium pit production, one to lease ground for AI data centers. The land is the same. The security regime is the same. The contracting agency is the same.

The Plutonium Adjacency

The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, or SRPPF, is being built on land that was originally allocated for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, or MOX plant. MOX was meant to convert weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel — to down-blend the U.S. plutonium stockpile and reduce its weapons-usable inventory. The MOX project was cancelled in 2018 after cost overruns and delays.

The same physical footprint is now being repurposed in the opposite direction. SRPPF will produce new plutonium pits — the fissile cores of nuclear warheads. NNSA's stated production target is 50 pits per year at Savannah River by 2035, plus 30 pits per year at Los Alamos. That is a 50-year arsenal modernization program, on the same site that is simultaneously being opened to AI data center development.

NNSA also restarted uranium recovery operations at the Savannah River H Canyon facility in 2025, directly supporting the DOE's broader fuel-cycle reconstitution. H Canyon is the only operating production-scale radiochemical separations facility in the United States.

The United States is restarting plutonium pit production, restarting uranium recovery, awarding a $61.5 billion 20-year operations contract, and opening 3,103 acres of the same site to AI infrastructure leases — all simultaneously.

The DOE press release describes this as a “great example of public-private partnership.”

The Indigenous-Land Dimension, Honestly

The land at Oak Ridge and Savannah River was Indigenous before it was American. The Cherokee, Yuchi, Westo, and Creek nations were present in both regions, and their cession of the land — under treaty pressure, military pressure, and the broader 18th-century framework of Indian land cessions — is part of the historical record.

It is also true that the immediate displacement at both sites, in 1942 and 1950-52, was not primarily of Indigenous people. It was of rural white Appalachian farmers at Oak Ridge and rural white South Carolinians at Savannah River. To call that Indigenous-land displacement without qualification flattens a more layered and more honest history.

The structural pattern is what matters and what Part II is trying to be precise about. The federal government identified land that was politically absorbable — Indigenous nations in cession negotiations in the 18th century, sparsely populated farming communities in the 20th — and used the same legal tools to acquire it for the same kind of strategic-asset purpose. The declaration of taking, the rapid timeline, the price set by federal appraisers, the offer of relocation that fell short of replacement. The mechanism is durable. The populations are interchangeable.

This is why the Northern Cheyenne case in Part I matters and why Part III will examine it in detail. The same mechanism that took Oak Ridge from Appalachian farmers in 1942, and Savannah River from South Carolinians in 1951, is now being directed at Indigenous land in 2026 — but this time without the declaration of taking, because tribal sovereignty makes that legal route slower. Instead the corporate vehicles are nondisclosure agreements, subsidiary cutouts, and state-level nuclear-siting statutes with tribal-approval provisions stripped in the Senate.

The mechanism evolves. The architecture is the same.

What Resolves in 2026

As of May 2026, none of the four federal-site awards have been publicly announced; evaluation of the closed solicitations continues.

The Oak Ridge solicitation closed December 1, 2025. The Savannah River solicitation closed December 5, 2025. The Idaho National Laboratory solicitation closed November 7, 2025, with awards expected by mid-December 2025. The Paducah solicitation closed January 30, 2026.

Four federal sites. Four closed solicitations. Awards rolling through 2026.

By the time those awards are public, the corporate-tenant identities will be known. The question Part II ends on is whether the awardees will resolve to the Stargate consortium (OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, MGX), to a separate national-security-customer architecture, or to some combination of both. The fuel side — the eleven DOE-blessed reactor companies, plus General Matter at Paducah for HALEU — will be the same regardless. The compute side is what will tell us what this buildout is actually for.

Part III takes us to Northern Cheyenne, where the same architecture meets a sovereign Indigenous nation. That piece runs tomorrow.

What This Walk Establishes

The administration is publicly framing the buildout as Manhattan Project 2.0 in its own press releases. Three senior officials, three statements, all on the record. That framing is not coming from the critics. It is coming from the podium.

Oak Ridge and Savannah River are being simultaneously modernized for nuclear weapons production and opened to AI data center leases. The same agency. The same land. The same security regime. NNSA is running both contracts in parallel.

The Indigenous-land framing on these two specific sites needs to be honest. The 1942 Oak Ridge displacement was 3,000 to 4,000 Appalachian farming families. The 1951 Savannah River displacement was 6,000 rural South Carolinians and 6,000 graves relocated. The deeper pattern — the federal government taking land from politically absorbable populations using rapid acquisition tools — is older than the Manhattan Project. The mechanism is durable. The populations rotate.

The corporate tenants at all four DOE sites will resolve in 2026. Until they do, the public is reading press-release framing instead of contract identities. That is the disclosure gap. That is what the architecture relies on.

One Additional Policy Ask

Six policy asks from Part I still stand. One more, specific to Part II:

Seven. Independent disclosure of all consortium members for every DOE AI infrastructure award — reactor companies, data center operators, energy partners, and any sub-tenants who will receive compute capacity from the awarded facilities. Awardee is not the same as end-customer. The press release at award time will name the prime contractor. The public needs to know who is downstream of the prime.

What Comes Next

Tomorrow I take you to Northern Cheyenne. Same architecture, different ground. This time the host utility's own CEO has said out loud that the unnamed customer behind a hyperscale data center next to the reservation is "probably" a federal contract. He doesn't know who. The tribe doesn't know who. The Montana legislature passed nuclear waste storage and uranium enrichment authority last year and stripped the tribal-approval amendment in the Senate at the bill sponsor's urging. The architecture I walked you through today is being aimed at a sovereign nation. That is what Part III is about.

After that, the reporting keeps going. The fuel cycle financial map. The MGX question. Whatever the news cycle hands me next week. The work continues.