nuclear-news

Failure of nuclear “renaissance” makes loans to uranium company unwise

Henry D. Sokolski, the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said Piketon was not a good bargain for taxpayers. “This thing has got more than nine lives, and none of them are worth living,” he said. “It will not do to whine about Solyndra
and wink at this.”……

John R. Longenecker, a consultant in the nuclear fuel business, said…. the industry had hoped for a renaissance that would result in many more reactors, he said, but “if that happened, I blinked and missed it.”

Loan Request by Uranium-Enrichment Company Scrambles Politics as Usual, NYT By MATTHEW L. WALD, November 24, 2011 WASHINGTON — The only American-owned company capable of enriching uranium is asking for government help to modernize its plant and remain in business.

That leaves Congress with a stark choice. It can either risk millions or billions of dollars to keep the company viable, or it will have to rely on domestic inventories and foreign-owned suppliers for a service that is crucial both to maintaining the country’s nuclear arsenal and
for running its 104 nuclear power reactors.

The company, USEC, which formerly stood for United States Enrichment
Corporation and was spun off by the government as a private company in
1998, runs a plant in Paducah, Ky., that uses 1940s technology to sort
the two dominant types of uranium so the enriched product can be used
as reactor fuel……

Those opposed to the loan guarantee say there is not enough of a
market for the product to justify another enrichment technology at
such a heavy cost.

Henry D. Sokolski, the executive director of the Nonproliferation
Policy Education Center, said Piketon was not a good bargain for
taxpayers. “This thing has got more than nine lives, and none of them
are worth living,” he said. “It will not do to whine about Solyndra
and wink at this.”……
USEC’s long-term future is in doubt for several reasons.

The company has kept itself afloat for 20 years in part by acting as
the agent for the United States government in a deal with the
Russians, to take uranium from former Soviet nuclear weapons and blend
it down to a level useful in power reactors. But that deal comes to an
end in 2013, and the American utilities have been discussing signing
supply contracts directly with Russia, which would reduce their
reliance on USEC…..
One alternative to government help could be a Russian investment in USEC…..
Meanwhile, competitors are moving ahead. Urenco, a European company,
opened an enrichment plant near Clovis, N.M., in June 2010, and is
planning to double its size, which would meet about half of American
enrichment demand.

AREVA, a French firm, got a loan commitment from the Energy Department
to build a similar plant in Eagle Rock, Idaho, although, because the
Fukushima accident has cut the demand for nuclear fuel, it has not
decided whether to proceed. The AREVA project was considered lower
risk than Piketon because its technology is proven.
John R. Longenecker, a consultant in the nuclear fuel business, said
the problem for USEC was that there were too many other players in the
market in a world awash in enrichment capacity. The industry had hoped
for a renaissance that would result in many more reactors, he said,
but “if that happened, I blinked and missed it.”

And there are large inventories of highly enriched uranium from
decades of past production, much of it from decommissioned weapons.
“We’ve got 100 years of high-enriched uranium in storage,” Mr.
Longenecker said. With additional material coming out of uranium
weapons, there is enough “probably for 1,000 years of whatever naval
fuel we need.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/business/loan-request-by-uranium-enrichment-concern-shakes-up-political-sides.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2

November 25, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Uranium, USA