"Australia was one of Melles-Griot’s strategic markets. That is where Dick Griot met Michael Goldsworthy, founder and president of Silex140, which was also developing a laser technology of uranium enrichment. Goldsworthy visited Los Angeles and the ITI laboratory; in 1988-1990 the two companies began to exchange science and research data. They negotiated a merger and were on the verge of setting up a joint venture in California. Silex and ITI lawyers had even prepared all the necessary documents - but two days before they were due to be signed Dick Griot called the deal off after receiving information from an agent in Sydney that Silex was unable to invest sufficient resources of its own into joint projects.141 Silex and Jeff Eerkens parted company. Almost 20 years later, in 2007, the Australian company made headlines after signing an exclusive deal with General Electric to commercialize its laser enrichment technology.
ITI, meanwhile, found a large investor in 1990. A joint venture was set up with Canada's Cameco, the world's largest producer of uranium at the time. ITI equipment was relocated from Los Angeles to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Province, where the Canadian corporation kept its HQ. Cooperation with Cameco ended three years later, in 1993, when significant quantities of Russian low-enriched uranium became available on the commercial market after the fall of the Iron Curtain. 142 Cameco decided that it made better commercial sense to become a reseller of Russian uranium (the arrangement did not work out in the end) rather than to continue investing in its own enrichment technology.143 In 1993 the Cameco Board of Directors voted down, by four votes to three, a three-year, 50m-dollar program of developing the CRISLA technology.
All the equipment which had already been installed at Cameco was returned to ITI. Dick Griot, who had already retired by that time, decided to give the equipment to his alma mater, the University of Missouri. For the first time since he moved to the United States in 1950, Jeff Eerkens was forced to leave California and relocate to Missouri. Ten years later, after completing his stint as an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, he returned to California and took his equipment with him. Eerkens holds more than 15 patents for inventions related to the laser technology of uranium isotope separation and for other innovations. These patents are valid for 17 years each, so most of them have already expired.145 In 1995 Eerkens published a 728-pages book entitled ‘Laser Isotope Separation’, which WalMart sold for 95.40 USD a copy.146 The book is now available from Amazon.com for 114 USD. The first batch of the experimental laser enrichment equipment made by Eerkens for AEOI is now at the Karaj Agriculture and Medical Centre. Eerkens keeps the second batch (the laser, the optical system and two irradiation chambers) in a warehouse near San Francisco, California. Ironically, before being returned to California the equipment was stored in open barns at the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources (a division of the University of Missouri).
Eerkens now has a new company, Prodev Consultants, and continues to look for opportunities for further improvement of his CRISLA technology. He believes that it can successfully compete with the Silex laser enrichment technology, which is now being commercialized by two giants of the global nuclear industry, GE-Hitachi and Cameco. Eerkens is convinced that his “Plan B” CRISLA technology approach, whose proof-of-principle was experimentally demonstrated in his 1986 tests, can produce reactor-grade uranium (3-5 per cent enrichment) in just two cycles, compared to the 5-10 cycles required by the gas centrifuge technology. He estimates the required initial investment at 2 million dollars"
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