May 28,
2013
[463
words]
USEC
is to wind up operations this month at the Paducah plant it leases from the
US Department of Energy (DoE). The 1950s facility is the last remaining
gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant in the world.
Paducah
was built between 1950 and 1952 at a cost of around $800 million as the USA's nuclear naval and power programs
grew from wartime research and development
Given
that USEC's American Centrifuge project is only at the stage of pilot
operation, the closure of Paducah will leave the company without any
enrichment capacity of its own. USEC said it would meet its commitments
from existing inventory and purchases from Russia - from the downblending of
decommissioned weapons or Russia's nuclear fuel export firm Tenex via a deal
signed in 2011 to cover USEC's orders in the timeframe of 2013-2022.
Bob
Van Namen is USEC's senior vice president and chief operating officer. He
said the company had looked at possible ways to continue enrichment at
Paducah, but the DoE "concluded there were not sufficient
benefits to taxpayers." The government department owns the facility
which it leases to USEC to operate.
The Paducah site will now be
prepared for closure. Van
Namen said USEC anticipates maintaining a workforce at Paducah "into
next year to support ongoing operations, perform
transition activities and meet regulatory requirements." He added
that USEC wanted to make the
transition to a shut-down state in a cost-effective manner: "The
company and our workforce have unparalleled experience that should be drawn
on."
Vice
president of enrichment operations Steve Penrod said: "We want to thank
our employees and the entire Paducah community for their efforts to support
continued enrichment at the plant. Although
the community has known about this possibility for a number of years, we
recognize that the Paducah area will soon feel the real impact of this decision
and its effects on many individuals and families."
US
legacy infrastructure
In
western Kentucky, Paducah has operated since September 1952 and has capacity
of 8 million SWU per year, compared to US reactor needs of 12.7 million SWU
per year. The plant was built in less than two years, at a cost of
around $800 million as the USA's
nuclear naval and power programs grew from wartime research and development. It
is located across the Ohio River from the Metropolis conversion plant in
southern Illinois, which turns uranium from solid to gaseous forms for the
enrichment process. That plant is owned by Honeywell and General Atomics
and operated by their joint venture ConverDyn.
Paducah
is the world's only remaining gaseous diffusion enrichment plant, and the
only US-owned enrichment facility in the USA (the other being Urenco's LES
facility, which was inaugurated in 2012). Metropolis is the USA's only
conversion plant.
Researched
and written
by
World Nuclear News
|
May 22, 2013
By Geoffrey Sea
[2,571 words]
Disaster
is about to strike in western Kentucky, a full-blown nuclear catastrophe
involving hundreds of tons of enriched uranium tainted with plutonium,
technetium, arsenic, beryllium and a toxic chemical brew. But this nuke calamity will
be no fluke. It’s been
foreseen, planned, even programmed, the result of an atomic extortion game
played out between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the most failed
American experiment in privatization, the company that has run the Paducah
plant into the poisoned ground, USEC Inc .
As now scheduled,
main power to the gargantuan gaseous diffusion uranium plant at Paducah,
Kentucky, will be cut at midnight on May 31, just nine days from now—cut
because USEC has terminated its power contract with TVA as of that time
[“USEC Ceases Buying Power,” Paducah Sun, April 19, page 1] and
because DOE can’t pick up the bill.
DOE is five months
away from the start of 2014 spending authority, needed to fund clean power-down
at Paducah. Meanwhile, USEC’s
total market capitalization has declined to about $45 million, not enough to
meet minimum listing requirements for the New York Stock Exchange, pay off
the company’s staggering debts or retain its operating licenses under financial
capacity requirements of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Paducah plant
cannot legally stay open, and it can’t safely be shut down—a lovely metaphor
for the end of the Atomic Age and a perfect nightmare for the people of
Kentucky.
Dirty Power-Down
If
the main power to the diffusion cascade is cut as now may be unavoidable, the
uranium hexafluoride gas inside thousands of miles of piping and process
equipment will crystallize, creating a very costly gigantic hunk of junk as a
bequest to future generations, delaying site cleanup for many decades and
risking nuclear criticality problems that remain unstudied. Unlike gaseous uranium that can be flushed from
pipes with relative ease, crystallized uranium may need to be chiseled out
manually, adding greatly to occupational hazards.
The gaseous
diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, TN, was powered-down dirty in 1985, in a safer
situation because the Oak Ridge plant did not have near the level of
transuranic contaminants found at Paducah. The Oak Ridge
catastrophe left a poisonous site that still awaits cleanup a quarter-century
later, and an echo chamber of political promises that such a stupid move
would never be made again. But that was before the privatization
of USEC.
Could a dirty power-down
at Paducah—where recycled and reprocessed uranium contaminated with plutonium
and other transuranic elements was added in massive quantities—result in “slow-cooker” critical mass formations
inside the process equipment? No
one really knows.
Everybody does know
that the Paducah plant is about to close . Its
technology is Jurassic, requiring about ten times the energy of competing
uranium enrichment methods around the world. The Paducah plant has been the largest single-meter consumer of
electric power on the planet, requiring two TVA coal plants just to keep it
operating, and it’s the largest single-source emitter of the very worst
atmospheric gasses—chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
The plant narrowly
escaped the selection process that shuttered its sister plants in Tennessee
and Ohio long ago. A 2012
apocalypse for Paducah workers was averted only by a last-second, five-party
raid on the U.S. Treasury involving four federal entities pitching together
to bail out USEC financially, a deal so arcane that knowledge of Mayan
astrological codices would be required to grasp its basic principles. The
plot would make for a great super-crime Hollywood movie in which Kentucky’s
own George Clooney and Ashley Judd could star, if only the crafting lawyers
and bureaucrats had made the Code of Federal Regulations as easy to decipher
as bible code, or half as interesting.
“The deal” that
saved Paducah operations for a year, past one crucial election
non-coincidentally, probably consumed more net energy than it produced by
stupidly paying USEC to run depleted uranium waste back through the
inefficient Paducah plant—like a massive government program paying citizens
to drink their own pee as a way to cut sewerage costs and keep medics
employed prior to a Presidential contest. The deal never would
have passed muster if it had been subjected to environmental or economic
reviews of any kind, but it wasn’t. The “jobs” mantra was chanted,
and all applicable laws from local noise-control ordinances to the Geneva
Conventions were waived.
But the deal expires
on May 31, in nine days. USEC and DOE have both said that
discussions for a new extension deal continue, but rumors of a new deal were dashed on May 7, sending USEC stock into a
flip-flop, when in an investor conference call , the company
announced that no extension had been agreed, with very pessimistic notes
about even a “short-term” postponement. That
accompanied news that USEC had
suffered a $2 million loss in the first quarter of 2013, largely attributable
to the power bill at Paducah, which USEC says it’s under no obligation to
keep paying.
Showing no
enthusiasm whatsoever, USEC CEO John Welch said on May 7:
“While we continue
to pursue options for a short-term extension of enrichment at Paducah
beyond May 31, we also continue to prepare to cease enrichment in early
June.”
Meanwhile, the
Kentucky DOE field office in charge, managed by William A. Murphie, has
advertised a host of companies “expressing interest” in future use of the
Paducah site, with no explanation of how the existing edifice of
egregiousness will be made to disappear. “Off the record,” the Kentucky field office has floated dates like
2060 for the completion of Paducah cleanup.
That’s two
generations from now and kind of a long time for the skilled workforce and
other interested parties to hang around. Even the 2060 date
assumes that costs can be minimized by evacuating the diffusion cells before
power-down—the scenario that seems certain not to happen because no one has
the funding for it. Flushing
the cells of uranium hexafluoride gas is the only sensible way to power-down,
but it’s costly and time-consuming. At the Piketon, Ohio, plant a semi-clean
power-down has cost billions of dollars and has taken twelve years and
counting to accomplish. (Murphie
will have to explain why he paid USEC so much money for the extended
power-down at Piketon, while simultaneously asserting that a Paducah
power-down can be accomplished swiftly and cheaply). Clean
power-down also requires that workers and supplies be available on demand,
and in the Paducah case, there simply isn’t time.
According
to reliable sources, contracts are being prepared for the work of placing the
plant into what Murphie calls “cold storage”—a term of his invention. But those contracts won’t take effect until
October when fiscal 2014 funds are available. “Cold storage” at that point means
closing the doors, posting guards outside, and otherwise walking away.
Can there yet be an
extension deal to hold over the plant until 2014 funds are available? Probably
not, because USEC may not last that long, the equipment in the plant has been
run to decrepitude with no attention to maintenance, there isn’t sufficient
time to make the arrangements, and a second end-run around environmental
compliance would likely generate lawsuits.
Captains Log: A
Heck of a Long Time
As to when the site
might be cleaned up for “future use” under a “cold storage” scenario, nothing
has even been rumored. I think we are talking Star Trek dates. Or
consider the half-life of natural uranium, which is about four and a half
billion years.
Until such time, the
Paducah plant will either sit like a massive metallic boil on the planet, or
be demolished and scavenged for semi-precious metals like the Oak Ridge
facility. But the plutonium, americium and neptunium at Paducah
may nix the latter possibility. The dirty power-down arranged by Murphie would make it impossible to
prevent transuranic atmospheric release during demolition.
I propose a bronze
encasement for the whole fandango, with a plaque that reads: WRECK
OF THE U.S. USEC GREATEST
FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT PRIVATIZATION IN WORLD HISTORY IN
MEMORIUM
At least that would
help Murphie comply with the National Historic Preservation Act. Call
it a learning experience.
Interested observers
are still awaiting some rabbit to be pulled from Murphie’s hat, as he
produced one year ago in 2012. To gauge that possibility I sent
Murphie an e-mail on May 10, asking him where he was going to get the money
to pay for clean power-down with the cut-off date only weeks away as reported
by USEC. Specifically, I wrote: “What’s up with that?”
And, within hours I
received a reply, probably because I had copied Mitch McConnel’s chief of
staff on my correspondence. Murphie wrote:
“As you are likely
aware, the Paducah procurement process has begun involving the USEC
facilities. I suggest you look at the DOE CBC home page regarding
the proposed IDIQ business opportunities and keep an eye on it for updates. As
for the funding question, the DOE did submit a request to Congress that
includes language regarding the potential USEC facilities return [a fiscal
year 2014 request].”
That’s a very
interesting reply because, aside from the vacuous PR about fantastic
“business opportunities” at a site of nuclear catastrophe (maybe a lollipop
factory!), it confirms that DOE does not have some secret stash of
funds to evacuate the diffusion cells at Paducah, at least until fiscal year
2014, at least five months too late. Murphie is still calling the certain closure of the Paducah
monstrosity “potential,” meaning he can’t yet pay for it. I asked Murphie to
resolve that dilemma in a follow-up e-mail, but alas I had used up my
entitlement to one response per five years and so got none.
I admit that some
pretty cool proposals for Paducah “future use” have been cooked up by Murphie
and his PR people. In mid-2012, Kentucky state legislators sought
an exemption from the state’s moratorium on nuclear power (a giveaway to coal
interests), so that Paducah could become a research center exploring the use
of nuclear explosives in fracking for
oil and gas. Hot diggity!
“Discussions”
between DOE and USEC about extension may indeed be ongoing. But I
imagine they are like the proverbial separation negotiations between the
gold-miner and the gold-digger. The gold-digger demands maintenance
for the lifestyle to which she’s become accustomed, or she’ll walk. The
gold-miner looks at the lump of iron pyrite he’s been left with and says:
“You already got everything I had.”
Murphie’s Law
So how did it come
to this? Since the plant was originally scheduled to cease
operations on May 31, 2012, why didn’t USEC and DOE have plenty of time to
plan for orderly and funded clean power-down, which was precisely what the
sleazy one-year extension deal was supposed to give time to accomplish.
The answer is that the entire uranium enrichment enterprise
of the U.S. has become a sham operation, a sham designed to funnel U.S.
Treasury funds to private companies including USEC and its partners, a
sham designed to convert any problem or scandal into additional contractor
award fees, a sham designed to keep the fig-leaf of a privatized USEC Inc. from
blowing away and exposing all the naughty bits.
Those became the
goals of the operation, not enriching uranium, developing new technology or
achieving safe operations or cleanup of the sites. Murphie’s Law
is that if anything can go wrong, it will boost contractor award fees, for a
select group of companies hand-picked by Murphie himself. Thus,
the principal “cleanup” contractors at Piketon are Fluor and Babcock &
Wilcox (B&W), both of which are suppliers to USEC’s fake “American
Centrifuge Project,” and B&W is a strategic partner of USEC with a large
share of USEC preferred stock, poised to take over USEC’s operations if the
latter goes under.
And
USEC is going under, by design, leaving its bondholders, pensioners and U.S.
taxpayers holding one very empty bag. USEC
stock has now lost 99% of value since its bubble peak in 2007. USEC’s
auditors issued a “going concern” letter in March of this year, warning that
the company appears to have no viable business plan moving forward. The New York Stock
Exchange issued a delisting warning to USEC in May of 2012, and a second
warning on a separate deficiency in May of 2013.
If
USEC is delisted, about half a billion dollars of debt to bondholders becomes
due immediately, and at least $100 million in pension obligations are owed in
Ohio and Kentucky each. But the entire company is only worth about a twentieth of its debts,
or about 1 percent of the cost of the new commercial plant it pretends it
will build. USEC’s
2013 shareholders meeting, at which the crisis might come to a precipitous
conclusion, was postponed from April to June, presumably to give the company a chance to depart from Paducah without
adding a nuclear crisis to its public liabilities. USEC is now an empty shell about to be shucked: the
company’s dissolution and the Paducah plant’s decommissioning have been timed
to coincide.
Once USEC has
departed Paducah, it will no longer be in the uranium enrichment business, as
it will operate no enrichment facilities. The company, which was created by statute for the sole purposes of
enriching uranium and developing new technology, will be doing neither. It will only be an
international uranium broker, ironically a front for Russian uranium
interests. Imagine if the U.S. Postal Service decided to hoard
its U.S. government subsidies, exit the mail delivery business and become
only a marketing agent for Russian stamps. That analogy precisely
applies to what USEC is doing, in stark violation of the USEC Privatization
Act.
But USEC has had two quite powerful politicians in its
service, from the states in which it has operated, men who control the
Republican caucuses in both chambers of Congress—John Boehner of southern
Ohio and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. If
Congress had appropriated the funds to pay for Paducah power-down in a timely
fashion, for fiscal year 2013, then the USEC house of cards would have come
down one year earlier. There could not have been rumors of
federally-financed extension deals, or stock speculation runs premised on
talk of a USEC buyout, or shipments of “spare parts” from Piketon to Paducah
just to make it look like USEC is a going concern.
In short, if Bill Muphie’s office had secured the
funds and let the contracts to do a clean power-down of Paducah starting June
1, then the jig would have been up for USEC months ago, the company might
already be in liquidation, and hundreds of millions of dollars in continuing
federal subsidies to USEC might not have been wasted. For its part, USEC has even now failed to announce a
date certain for Paducah closure, although cancellation of its power contract was an effective extortion tactic
for wheedling additional dollars from federal coffers.
So Murphie didn’t
secure the funds and didn’t issue the contracts, and kept right on doing
federally-paid PR work to falsely suggest there could be a smooth economic
conversion at Paducah. Boehner and McConnell ate it all up while
chanting the “jobs” mantra, for it reinforced their narrative that USEC Inc. is
the best thing since sliced atoms. To
keep a large campaign contributor out of bankruptcy court for a few more
months, the Paducah plant was permitted to reach the current crisis state. And the people of
Kentucky were sent straight to nuclear hell.
Nine days.
|
