Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Piketon, OH

Piketon is a village in Pike County, Ohio, along the Scioto River in the Appalachian foothills of southern Ohio.

Originally called Jefferson, Piketon served as the county seat of Pike County from 1815 to 1845, when the seat was moved to Waverly to be closer to the then-new Ohio and Erie Canal.

Piketon's best-known historic resident was Robert Lucas, the twelfth governor of Ohio and the first territorial governor of Iowa.

Piketon's population was 2,111 at the 2020 census; the 2010 census counted 2,181 people living in 820 households.

The village covers about 2.55 square miles along the Scioto River.

Piketon is best known nationally for its uranium enrichment plant, one of only three such plants in the United States.

The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, just south of the village, was built by the U.S. Department of Energy beginning in 1952 and started enriching uranium in 1954, employing about 3,000 people at its peak.

The diffusion plant enriched uranium first for weapons and later for nuclear power plants until it was placed on cold standby in 2001, and a massive federal cleanup of the roughly 4,000-acre site is still under way.

Centrus Energy's American Centrifuge Plant at Piketon operated the first publicly visible U.S. gas-centrifuge enrichment cascade in 2005, and the site is now the only U.S.-owned, U.S.-technology uranium enrichment plant in production, making high-assay low-enriched uranium for advanced reactors.

In January 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded Centrus a $900 million contract to expand uranium enrichment operations at Piketon.