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    US DOE critical minerals cleanup at legacy sites: key points for mine planners

    September 18, 2026|

    Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

    US DOE critical minerals cleanup at legacy sites: key points for mine planners

    First reported on MINING.com

    30 Second Briefing

    The US Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has issued an expression of interest to US companies for potential transfer and recovery of surplus critical minerals and rare earth-related materials at five nuclear cleanup sites: Paducah (Kentucky), Portsmouth (Ohio), Oak Ridge (Tennessee), Nevada National Security Site and Moab (Utah). Targeted materials include aluminium, copper, lead, silver, platinum, tungsten, vanadium, fluorine, lithium hydride, chloride, selenium and cesium-137. Interested parties must supply their own extraction, processing and handling equipment, with DOE evaluating responses on technical capability and proposed end-use plans.

    Technical Brief

    • Expression of interest (EOI) covers five EM nuclear cleanup sites: Paducah, Portsmouth, Oak Ridge, Nevada National Security Site and Moab.
    • Site-specific annexes to the EOI detail material types, quantities and exact storage locations for each facility.
    • EM will run a virtual Industry Day on 30 September to brief bidders and clarify technical queries.
    • Materials originate from historic nuclear weapons production and energy R&D, implying legacy containment, radiological controls and complex handling constraints.
    • Cesium-137 and lithium hydride in the inventory introduce additional shielding, criticality safety and specialised transport requirements.
    • Respondents must propose full process flows for relocation, extraction, processing and end-use, not just offtake.
    • DOE evaluation criteria explicitly weight demonstrated technical knowledge and robustness of proposed utilisation plans over simple commercial interest.
    • For mining and processing firms, the programme effectively functions as a brownfield urban-mining opportunity within heavily regulated federal sites.

    Our Take

    The U.S. Department of Energy’s use of legacy sites like Paducah, Portsmouth and Oak Ridge for critical minerals and rare earth elements recovery lines up with its separate ‘Mine of the Future’ testbed awards, signalling DOE is effectively building a distributed R&D-to-deployment pipeline that spans both brownfield nuclear sites and greenfield mining pilots.

    Critical minerals and rare earth elements already feature heavily in our mining coverage, and DOE’s parallel funding for recovery technologies (e.g. via the Critical Materials Innovation Hub) suggests that solutions proven at these U.S. cleanup sites could later be exported to commercial copper, iron ore and bauxite operations facing ore-grade depletion and tailings reprocessing challenges.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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