our old friends from usec

Top story on Yahoo Finance. hehe bet they wish they hadn't shunned Silex :)


PIKETON, Ohio (AP) -- In a building far from public view in the tree-covered hills of southern Ohio, the company that recycles uranium from Russian warheads for fueling U.S. nuclear power plants is preparing to demonstrate an advance from Cold War technology.

USEC Inc., which last month began interior construction on its American Centrifuge Plant some 65 miles south of Columbus, is nearly ready to show off its process at a demonstration facility.

The company says using centrifugal force to enrich uranium is much more efficient than the 1950s-developed gaseous diffusion method, with the new plant expected to use about 5 percent of the electricity needed for gaseous diffusion. USEC runs a gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, Ky., the only uranium enrichment plant in the United States.

The centrifuge demonstration could be only weeks away, although no firm date is set, spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said. USEC, based in Bethesda, Md., still is trying to line up investors for the $2.3 billion commercial plant, part of a 3,714-acre site where a gaseous diffusion plant closed six years ago.

"Investors are always more comfortable when they can kick the tires," Stuckle said of the planned demonstration.

USEC expects the commercial plant to begin operation in late 2009 and to have 11,500 centrifuge machines, each about 40 feet tall, running in 2012.

Local officials welcome the expected 400-plus permanent jobs the project will bring in an area that typically has one of the state's highest unemployment rates, and supporters say it will help U.S. efforts toward energy independence. The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant at the site enriched uranium for weapons and nuclear fuel before closing in 2001, leaving its sister plant in Paducah.

"We're tickled to death," Harry Rider, president of the Pike County Commission, said of progress on the USEC project. "We want the business here, that's the bottom line."

Dan Minter, president of United Steelworkers Local 5-689, said the union and the company are negotiating how many union jobs will be part of building and operating the centrifuge system.

"There's a heritage here of over 50 years. We'd like to be part of that process," Minter said.

The demonstration project is about two years behind schedule. Failure to meet timetables, cost overruns and questions about nuclear waste that will be generated concern longtime activist Geoffrey Sea, who said he is spokesman for a group of people who live near the plant.

"This is not being for or against a uranium plant," Sea said. "They were supposed to do a demonstration, then get a license; they couldn't demonstrate the technology, they don't have working centrifuges. No one in the public can make direct evaluations."

Minter said he believes the technology will work.

"This must succeed. The risk is too great of not having a viable enrichment operation," Minter said. "We should have learned our lesson from our dependency on foreign oil and gas. To rely on another nation would be irresponsible."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in April licensed the project for 30 years.

The Energy Department built and ran the Portsmouth and Paducah plants. USEC was created in 1993 to take over the government's uranium enrichment enterprise and to be the U.S. agent for recycling bomb-grade uranium from Russia for fuel for American nuclear power plants, a nonproliferation program called "Megatons to Megawatts."

USEC, which was privatized in 1998, reported $1.85 billion in revenues last year. The company's shares fell 24 cents, or 1.1 percent, to $21.79 Monday, but they're near their record high of $25.65 reached last month. The low for the past year has been $9.19.

The American Centrifuge Plant project has about 140 employees at Piketon. Another 1,100 work for United States Enrichment Corp., USEC's subsidiary, under contract to the Energy Department in various projects here.