A consortium of European and U.S. companies said yesterday that it plans to apply for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct a $1.1 billion plant for enriching uranium for nuclear power plants in the United States (see GSN, Dec. 10, 2001).

The consortium, known as Louisiana Energy Services, includes Westinghouse Electric Co., Fluor Daniel, Exelon, Entergy, Duke Energy, the British-Dutch-German company Urenco and Canada’s Cameco Corp.  The group is considering building the plant at one of a few sites that are already licensed for nuclear uses, in particular in Lynchburg, Va., Wilmington, N.C., or Erwin, Tenn.  The plant would be operational by 2007 or 2008 (Matthew Wald, New York Times, July 23).

The proposed facility, which would be able to supply up to a quarter of the U.S. demand for enriched uranium by 2012, would use centrifuge technology developed and used by Urenco.  Centrifuge facilities are currently located only in Europe and Russia, according to the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.  The centrifuge process for enriching uranium is considered better than the alternative gaseous diffusion process because it requires only 2 percent of the energy used in diffusion (Murray Lyons, Saskatoon Star Phoenix, July 23).

Competition

The only company that currently provides domestically produced enriched uranium for U.S. plants is the U.S. Enrichment Corp., which runs a plant in Paducah, Ky.  USEC’s 1950s-built diffusion plant forces gaseous uranium through a barrier that separates uranium-235 and uranium-238.  USEC produces much of its supply of fuel-grade uranium not through an enrichment process but by blending down uranium from Russian nuclear weapons (see GSN, June 20; Wald, New York Times).

The United States would probably prefer to have more of its uranium supply produced in the United States rather than imported from Europe or Russia, Cameco Chief Operating Officer Bernard Michel said (Lyons, Saskatoon Star Phoenix, July 23).

If the consortium were to build the proposed enrichment facility, USEC’s monopoly on domestic enriched uranium would end, the New York Times reported.  USEC won a trade case this year to impose tariffs on two European uranium suppliers, but those tariffs would not apply to a plant built in the United States with European technology (see GSN, Jan. 23).

“As a business, they are dead,” Thomas Neff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said of USEC.  If the company does not build an enrichment plant, it will become only a broker of Russian uranium, he said.

The consortium has better technology, chairman Patrick Upson said.

“We have a significant head-start on the technical side,” he said.

USEC said a month ago that it wants to build a plant once it modernizes a prototype plant tested in the 1980s.

“USEC remains the leading supplier of enriched uranium fuel in the United States market, and we’re on track to be enriching uranium using new advanced gas centrifuges by the end of the decade,” USEC spokesman Charles Yulish said.  “We expect our technology to be proven the most efficient in the world” (Wald, New York Times).

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