Despite public funding, no governmental process is contemplated for gathering or disseminating data on the commercial worthiness of USEC’s centrifuges, because that answer is already widely known: The technology at issue is forty years old and out of date…… doesn’t produce anything anymore and it never will
the “American Centrifuge” project (ACP) was never more than a false front, a mechanism for wrangling government bailout after government bailout, while the rock-red company waited for a Republican administration that would approve its audacious waste storage plans.
That team included Iraq War architect Richard Perle and a physics professor whose only claim to fame was in pushing centralized storage solutions for spent nuclear fuel. His name was Ernest Moniz. (left)
Uranium Titan Tumbles EcoWatch July 12, 2013 By Geoffrey Sea ”……The Un-American Centrifuge Plant Created first as a government corporation in response to a mismanagement scandal at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in the 1990s, USEC was privatized in 1998. The USEC Privatization Act, premised on delusional Thatcherite ideology, placed two solemn obligations on the respective parties in the split: The Department of Energy, though continuing to own the land and facilities with which USEC operates, had to stay out of the business of uranium enrichment; USEC, while free to conduct its business as a private corporation, had to use its free access to public land and resources to develop advanced uranium enrichment technology and improve the U.S. position in the global enrichment marketplace.
Now those statutory goals can only bring a ROFLMAO reaction. USEC has become a wholly-dependent ward of the Department of Energy, which effectively makes all the big “business” decisions that concern enrichment, and USEC has defaulted on any credible effort to deploy a domestic advanced enrichment technology. Yet the Privatization Act remains on the books, its provisions violated cavalierly but with no efforts at repeal, like metropolitan municipal laws about donkey carts and Sunday dancing.
The basic and shocking truth about USEC, which now ought to be celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of its privatization, is that the company, ballyhooed as “vital for national security” by members of Congress and local chambers of commerce, doesn’t produce anything anymore and it never will. It enriches no uranium, its government-granted sweetheart deal to market Russian warhead uranium expires at the end of this year, and its “American Centrifuge” project (ACP) at Piketon, Ohio, has become a parody of patriotism, so outpaced by Russian, European, Australian and Iranian competitors that the company can’t whip up enough whirl on a centrifuge machine to spin a cotton candy cone for the USEC anniversary.
ACP was scandalously licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for construction and operation in 2007, and $520 million of bonds were issued to finance that construction, all premised on plant completion between 2011 and 2013. Now past the projected commercial opening date, not only has construction of a full-scale plant not neared completion, it hasn’t really been started, and estimated completion costs are now about twice what they were in 2007.
A supervisor on the project told me that most of the initial expenditure, affording USEC a hefty tax write-off it’s already taken, went to replace the roofs on the pre-existing buildings, apparently to ready those buildings for some use other than a centrifuge plant. That actually makes sense because USEC has never demonstrated possession of a commercially-competitive centrifuge technology ready for deployment, and has resisted that eight-year overdue demonstration like the legendary Count Dracula avoiding a mirror. And for precisely the same reason: If USEC were forced to complete a demonstration, it would only reflect the vacuity of the project. Imaginary monsters cast no reflection.
A so-called “Research, Development and Demonstration” (RD&D) projects, now being “completed” at Piketon with 80 percent federal funding, is only more smoke and mirrors, minus the mirrors, because the program involves no actual research, development, or demonstration of commercial viability. If completed, the project will only demonstrate that USEC centrifuges can spin without exploding, like a toaster demonstration that shows glowing coils but fails to produce any toast.
Despite public funding, no governmental process is contemplated for gathering or disseminating data on the commercial worthiness of USEC’s centrifuges, because that answer is already widely known: The technology at issue is forty years old and out of date, a fact confirmed by an active proposal from GE-Hitachi to use their molecular laser enrichment technology to extract usable uranium from USEC’s own old waste product at the Paducah site, a proposal that has brought no counter-offer from USEC. The real purpose of the “RD&D” project at Piketon is only to extend out the schedule of USEC’s galactically-embarrassing inevitable collapse.
This is no NIMBY attitude, though the centrifuge project is literally in my backyard. (My property has a one-mile long fence line with the USEC-leased portion of the DOE reservation). I’m the one who’s been telling anti-nuclear activists for nine years to stop directing their attacks at a centrifuge plant, because no centrifuge plant will ever happen here. I’d call the American Centrifuge Plant a pipe dream, if its pipes had any more reality than Bush’s “aluminum tubes.”
That other intended use of the so-called “centrifuge” buildings at Piketon became clear from the outset in 2007, when the Bush DOE, led by an assistant secretary who had formerly been Chief Operating Officer of USEC, pushed to make Piketon a storage center for the nation’s languishing stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel. USEC had purchased the leading American spent fuel storage company, and used its DOE-lease and NRC-license as Piketon place-holders, waiting to ditch its unviable centrifuge project for a far more lucrative federal contract warehousing nuclear waste. USEC had been given virtually unregulated and unconstitutional control of the federal sites at Piketon and Paducah, on the single condition that the company proclaims, with no means for verification, that it is developing an “advanced” uranium enrichment technology at those sites. Had John McCain won the 2008 election, USEC might have cashed in big by turning Piketon into the world’s largest nuclear dump.
That was not to be, however, and now USEC is stuck having to continually say it will build an enrichment plant that the company never had the technology, financing, or motivation to build. Politicians and the media have a hard time comprehending it, but the ACP project was never more than a false front, a mechanism for wrangling government bailout after government bailout, while the rock-red company waited for a Republican administration that would approve its audacious waste storage plans.
That was Plan A for the Piketon A-Plant, until the company just ran out of steam. False-front hi-tech deceptions can get expensive. ACP taxpayer funding was utilized as a bridge to USEC’s intended diversification, which is exactly the strategy that its 2002 team of new “strategic advisors” recommended. That team included Iraq War architect Richard Perle and a physics professor whose only claim to fame was in pushing centralized storage solutions for spent nuclear fuel. His name was Ernest Moniz. http://ecowatch.com/2013/uranium-titan-tumbles/
said in November that government funding for its $350 million American Centrifuge Project in Ohio would end in January.
uranium news 