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link in news item today - GE-Hitachi picks Nth Carolina for possible enrichment Plant. Good read.

Wire: Access Intelligence (PBI) Date: 2008-06-02 20:44:46
GE-Hitachi Picks North Carolina For Possible Enrichment Plant


BY GEORGE LOBSENZ

In an announcement that promises to stoke competition in the
increasingly crowded race to build a new U.S. reactor fuel supply
facility, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy announced Wednesday it has chosen
Wilmington, N.C.--its corporate headquarters--as the site for a
possible new uranium enrichment plant.
The company, which owns the rights to an advanced laser
enrichment technology developed by Australia-based Silex Systems Ltd.,
said it would not decide whether to build a commercial-scale uranium
enrichment plant until it has the initial results from a "demonstration
test loop" now under construction at its Wilmington site.
However, officials with Global Laser Enrichment, the subsidiary
of GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy that would build and operate the
enrichment facility, said the selection of Wilmington meant the company
would be pushing ahead with federal permitting activities.
"This is a key milestone in Global Laser Enrichment's
development process," said Tammy Orr, president and chief executive
officer of the company. "With the selection of the Wilmington site for
a potential commercial facility, we can now move forward with the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing process."
GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy plans to decide by as early as 2009
whether to build the facility, which would have an annual production
capacity of between 3.5 and 6 million separative work units. The
company said current licensing activities are targeting a start-up date
of 2012.
The uranium enrichment project would appear to be particularly
attractive for GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy because it would enable the
company to become more integrated nuclear fuel supplier.
GE, Hitachi and Toshiba currently jointly own and operate
Wilmington-based Global Nuclear Fuel-Americas (GNF-A), which receives
low-enriched uranium and fabricates it into fuel bundles for commercial
nuclear power plants. The new enrichment facility could become a
supplier of low- enriched uranium to the Wilmington GNF-A fabrication
facility.
With the selection of the Wilmington site, GE Hitachi Nuclear
Energy follows two other companies--Louisiana Enrichment Services (LES)
and USEC Inc.--into the race to build a new U.S. enrichment facility.
Both LES and USEC have won NRC approval to build their planned
facilities, with LES' facility in Eunice, N.M., and USEC's plant at
Piketon, Ohio.
LES, which is owned by Urenco, a European enrichment company
that is jointly owned by the Dutch and British governments and two
German utilities, says its plant is under construction and is scheduled
to begin operations in 2009.
Maryland-based USEC, which runs the only currently operated U.S.
enrichment facility at Paducah, Ky., is running test facilities at
Piketon--a former Energy Department enrichment site--in anticipation of
building a new enrichment plant there. However, USEC is facing
difficulty in financing its plant, and says rising costs for steel,
cement and other construction needs have sharply raised cost estimates
for its project to around $3.5 billion.
Also moving to get into the game is Areva, the nuclear services
giant owned by the French government, which has been considering five
states for a possible new plant: Idaho, New Mexico, Washington, Texas
and Ohio. Idaho would appear to be the front-runner for Areva's
project, given that the state's governors and lawmakers recently
enacted legislation to provide millions of dollars in tax breaks to woo
the company.
The intensifying competition in the U.S. enrichment market
reflects the increasing optimism that U.S. utilities are moving forward
with plans to build new nuclear plants.
At the same time, much of the current uranium supplied to the
U.S. market is coming from Russia under a U.S.-Russia nuclear agreement
that is heading into its final years. With the expiration of that
agreement, which gives USEC exclusive rights to market Russian uranium
in the U.S. market, new opportunities will open up for other reactor
fuel suppliers to meet U.S. demand.
Urenco says Russia supplied 55 percent of U.S. enriched uranium
in 2001, with Urenco's European plants providing another 16 percent and
USEC 12 percent.
Urenco says its New Mexico plant, with a projected total
capacity of 3 million separative work units, could meet approximately
one-fourth of current U.S. enrichment services demand.
While the U.S. market would appear to be big enough to
accommodate all the potential new enrichment plants, the competition
among the companies may turn on the relative efficiency of their
enrichment technologies.
LES and USEC are deploying advanced gas centrifuge technologies,
with LES already using centrifuge technology in its European plants and
USEC employing older, less-efficient gaseous diffusion technology at
its Paducah plant.
GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, which also is marketing advanced
reactors, says its laser enrichment isotope separation technology
offers major efficiency advantages. Past attempts by the Energy
Department to deploy laser-based enrichment technology proved
problematic, but those efforts occurred decades ago.