PIKETON, Ohio — The U.S. Department of Energy is celebrating what it calls “major progress” on the demolition of the X-333 Process Building at the Portsmouth Site. By the department’s own number, about 9 percent of the building has come down.
In a video posted Thursday by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, Assistant Secretary Tim Walsh walked the demolition site with Joe Saltsman, director of plant projects for demo and balance at the Southern Ohio Cleanup Company, the site’s cleanup contractor. Saltsman said he has worked at the plant for almost 18 years.
Asked how much of the building has come down so far, Saltsman said: “Approximately 9% thus far.” Asked whether the work is on schedule, he said: “We are. We’re actually a little ahead. So we’re really making good progress.”
Saltsman described the years of work that came before the first wall fell — planning, construction of air monitoring and water containment systems, and the challenge of taking down a contaminated building safely. “It’s been a big challenge but it’s been a lot of fun,” he said.
DOE’s caption on the video says the demolition is “helping clear the way for a new future at Portsmouth that will bring new investments, jobs, and economic opportunities to the community.”
What the video does not say
X-333 is one of three massive process buildings at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which enriched uranium here for nearly five decades before enrichment ended in 2001. The other 91 percent of X-333 is still standing. The plant’s X-326 Process Building is not. X-326 is all the way down, and crews are grading its slab — the ground where the planned data center campus is to rise. DOE’s celebration of a 9 percent start on X-333 does not mention that the ground it calls the site’s future is already being prepared.
The building is not leaving Piketon. Demolition debris from the plant is being buried on the site itself, in the On-Site Waste Disposal Facility — a landfill Pike County residents fought for years before DOE built it anyway.
Nor did the video put a date or a dollar figure on the milestone. DOE did not say when X-333 will be fully down, what the demolition costs, or when work on the next building begins.
And the “new future” DOE describes remains, for now, mostly paper. The newest piece of it — a proposed AEP 765-kilovolt transmission line to serve a planned PORTS Technology Campus — has not yet reached the application stage at the Ohio Power Siting Board. As J News Network reported this week, AEP has filed only a pre-application notification letter in Case No. 26-1060-EL-BTX. Public information meetings on the line are set for Dec. 1 at the Pike County Fairgrounds in Piketon, Dec. 2 at the Ross County Fairgrounds in Chillicothe and Dec. 3 at Deer Creek Lodge in Mt. Sterling.
Nine percent is real progress, measured against a building that has stood over this community for 70 years. It is also, by DOE’s own arithmetic, the first nine percent.
This article is based on a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management video posted Nov. 12, 2026, and on J News Network’s prior reporting on the Portsmouth Site. It is part of The Fallout Files, JNN’s continuing investigation of the Portsmouth plant and its legacy in Pike County.
LIVE UPDATE — U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, NOV. 12
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management posted the video at 2:16 p.m. on Nov. 12, 2026. In it, Assistant Secretary Tim Walsh speaks with Joe Saltsman of the Southern Ohio Cleanup Company at the X-333 demolition site. Saltsman said crews have demolished approximately 9 percent of the building and are slightly ahead of schedule, and described the air monitoring and water containment work the demolition requires.
