nuclear-news

Nuclear fuel plant unable to get loan guarantee

‘Crunch time’ at troubled nuclear fuel plant Washington Post By Steven Mufson,   January 13 U.S. Enrichment Corp., which produces fuel for nuclear power plants, is having its own sort of meltdown.

Disillusioned investors have wiped out 95 percent of the company’s market value since 2007. Standard & Poor’s has saddled it with a dismal CCC-plus credit rating. And USEC’s chief executive John Welch
says that “clearly we’re coming to crunch time here.” When USEC was
created by the U.S. government in the 1990s, the idea was to privatize
the job of uranium enrichment. USEC leased an old Energy Department
plant and under a program known as Megatons to Megawatts, it has
blended down highly enriched uranium taken from 17,698 Russian
warheads under a U.S.-Russia treaty.

Two decades later, however, the Bethesda-based firm is still
struggling to stand on its own two feet. Its deal for inexpensive
supplies from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons runs out at the end
of 2013. A contract for electricity from the Tennessee Valley
Authority expires in May and USEC’s outdated plant — which devours as
much electricity as the city of Nashville — will be unable to compete
with other companies.

USEC says it needs government help. It wants to build a new, more
efficient facility that would house thousands of 43-foot-tall
centrifuges. But the two-month budget measure Congress passed in
December blocks a $150 million Energy Department grant that USEC needs
to continue development. And USEC’s application for a $2 billion
Energy Department loan guarantee has been stalled for nearly four
years, despite lobbying by the entire congressional delegation from
Ohio, where the company wants to build the plant…..
The political fallout: Boehner blames Obama for failing to approve the
loan guarantee. The Obama administration, burned by bad publicity over
its loan to a now-bankrupt solar panel maker named Solyndra, says
USEC’s credit rating is too low to qualify for a loan guarantee and
blames Boehner for blocking the grant.    http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/crunch-time-at-troubled-nuclear-fuel-plant/2011/12/20/gIQAIpUJwP_story.html

January 14, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Uranium, USA