Uranium Enrichment:  Urenco Seeks U.S. Plant

Urenco, a European company that supplies enriched uranium, hopes to obtain U.S. regulatory approval to build a new uranium enrichment plant in the United States, the Financial Times reported today.

Urenco, along with its partners Duke Power and Excelon, plan to apply next month for regulatory approval for construction.  New partners may be added as Urenco seeks more funding, said Urenco Chief Executive Klaus Messer.

Currently the only producer of enriched uranium in the United States is the U.S. Enrichment Corp., a government-created corporation, according to the Times.  USEC is the sole U.S. company in the U.S.-Russian HEU deal, which seeks to aid Russian nuclear disarmament through the purchase of nuclear power plant fuel made from Russian nuclear weapons materials (see GSN, Nov. 30).  Earlier this year, USEC filed an anti-dumping and countervailing duty suit against Urenco and the French company Cogema-Eurodif, the Times reported.

Excelon Chairman Corbin McNeill and Duke Executive Vice President Michael Tuckman last month wrote to U.S. President George W. Bush asking him to “reconsider [USEC’s] current monopoly status.”  McNeill and Tuckman wrote they wanted to build a new U.S. enrichment plant because the country “simply must have more than a single source of supply for enriched uranium” (Nancy Dunne, Financial Times, Dec. 10).

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