nuclear-news

USEC uranium scandal will make the Solyndra solar story look trivial

Uranium Titan Tumbles  EcoWatch July 12, 2013  By Geoffrey Sea“……..USEC has certainly achieved some record-setting milestones. The $5 billion price tag on a completed commercial centrifuge plant (an estimate USEC has not bothered to update) would be approximately 350 times the total current market value of the entire company. It’s like a kite-flying club saying that it will build a B-2 bomber. The annual salary of CEO John Welch is about a third of the total value of his company, a rate of compensation justified only by his ability to keep a straight face when saying that he expects the government to give him a $2 billion loan guarantee. Say “Solyndra” a hundred times slowly after setting off a stink-bomb to get some sense of the magnitude of the incipient scandal when USEC finally bites the dust.

But no, that really isn’t fair to Solyndra. Solyndra may have been a case of the government picking winners and losers unwisely. USEC is a case of the government picking a loser intentionally over and over again, only because the privatized cash recipient has strategically and falsely promised jobs in the states and districts of powerful Members of Congress.

Once described in the Financial Times of London as “the trust fund baby of the American nuclear industry,” USEC has squandered every sequential $50-million allowance check from the feds on posh executive salaries and luxurious lobbying. Therefore, the allegedly-private company still needs a couple of billions from the government, just to make ends meat and ward off investment-fraud litigation. The company’s loan guarantee application, repeatedly submitted in the run-up to key elections, has already been twice denied because “USEC had nothing, absolutely nothing,” in the words of a former aide to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

Even if USEC got that federal loan by some underworld device, criminal or demonic, it would need to raise at least an additional $3 billion to complete a new production plant, which Welch says, still straight-faced and with no supporting evidence, could come from a Japanese international bank. I suppose that would be in gratitude for USEC’s supply of nuclear fuel to the three reactors at Fukushima that melted down and are still leaking. Those silly Japanese and their short memories and spare cash………. http://ecowatch.com/2013/uranium-titan-tumbles/

July 16, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA