Uranium race — Companies vie to provide fuel for U.S. 'nuclear renaissance'
Even as the government continues to oppose Iran's efforts to enrich uranium for power plants, projects to do just that are under way in the United States.
General Electric Co. and USEC Inc., along with European rivals Urenco Ltd. and Areva Inc., are pushing billions worth of new U.S. enrichment plants or technology so they don't miss the new uranium boom. In Utah, the long-dormant uranium industry is part of that boom, with old mines reopening, one processing mill in operation and another slated to begin work.
Opponents including the Union of Concerned Scientists fear that the increased uranium activity in the United States sends the wrong message to countries like Iran. The group argues it's unclear whether the United States really needs new facilities, when it could just import nuclear fuel from elsewhere.
Still, shipments from Russia, which now supplies about 40 percent of enriched uranium for U.S. commercial reactors, are due to be cut roughly in half by 2013. And an aging U.S. enrichment facility in Paducah, Ky., is due to be shuttered. That means power plants here will have to fill the vacuum, including from new domestic suppliers.
Promoters tout nuclear power as an antidote to coal-fired plants that contribute to global warming. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission took applications to build seven new nuclear reactors in 2007, with 25 more licensing requests expected through 2009.
Officials from French-owned Areva have been tromping around eastern Idaho's lava and sagebrush steppe since last year near the 850-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory site, where U.S. scientists have done nuclear research since 1949. Now, the company is trying to coax the state Legislature into giving it tax breaks to make building in Idaho more attractive.
If it doesn't get them, Areva says it could build elsewhere.
Meanwhile, General Electric is working on a laser process for enriching uranium at a test facility in North Carolina and has indicated its intent to apply for a full-scale project, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Urenco, with enrichment operations in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, is part of a consortium whose $1.5 billion enrichment facility has spawned a boomtown in southeastern New Mexico. The plant is due to open next year.
And Maryland-based USEC is building its American Centrifuge plant in the Ohio river town of Piketon and expects to enrich enough uranium there by 2012 to supply a quarter of existing U.S. demand.
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