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Energy Industry Consortium Plots Development of New Uranium Enrichment Plant in New Mexico

BACKGROUND
A consortium of energy companies called Louisiana Energy Services (LES) is seeking to develop a new uranium enrichment plant in the continental United States. The LES consortium was formed in the late 1980s (at which time the group was composed of a somewhat different collection of partners), and assumed the name "Louisiana Energy Services" because the group originally intended to locate its new uranium enrichment plant in a rural area near the small town of Homer, Louisiana, but was ultimately forced to abandon these plans after protest from local groups who claimed that LES was guilty of environmental racism for choosing a site populated by minorities. In fact, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), rejected LES’s petition for a license (its first and only denial of such a license) on these grounds. More recently, LES backed out of another potential site that it had been scouting for the development of a uranium enrichment plant: Trousdale County, Tennessee. Here, the consortium was met with fierce opposition from local environmental groups.  The Tennessee site was formerly owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a quasi-governmental public utility company.

After being pushed out of two other areas by local residents fueled by indignation, LES is back at it, trying to push its hazardous plant on another unfortunate rural community. This country and these communities have no need for another polluting uranium enrichment plant.

WHO IS LES?
The LES consortium is led by Urenco—itself a consortium of British, Dutch, and German government and corporate entities—and also includes the construction firm Fluor-Daniel and the energy industry giants Exelon Corp., Entergy Corp., Duke Energy, and Westinghouse Electric Co. Exelon, Entergy, and Duke are public utility-holding companies that own and operate nuclear power reactors, and are in consultation with the NRC to develop new nuclear reactors. Ownership in a domestic uranium enrichment facility would significantly reduce fuel costs for their current and, potentially, future nuclear power stations. Exelon has the largest nuclear fleet in the nation, operating ten nuclear power stations with a total of seventeen reactors. Entergy operates eight stations with a total of ten reactors, and Duke owns three stations with a total of seven reactors.  Westinghouse is owned by British Nuclear Fuels, Ltd. (BNFL), and is the world’s largest manufacturer of nuclear reactors.

Each of these companies has an interest in greater ownership of nuclear fuel chain, and this is why they have collectively formed LES, which exists solely for the purpose of developing a new domestic uranium enrichment facility. Increasing the capacity of domestic enriched uranium production merely serves the profit interests of these corporations.

A NEW URANIUM ENRICHMENT PLANT IS NOT NEEDED
The nuclear power industry is dependent upon "enriched" uranium as fuel for its nuclear reactors, which require fuel with a higher proportion of the isotope uranium-235, relative to uranium-238, than that which is found in natural sources. The enrichment process increases the proportion of uranium-235, making the substance usable as fuel in nuclear reactors.

The LES consortium is competing with USEC—the only domestic producer of enriched uranium as fuel for nuclear power reactors—to build another uranium enrichment facility in the States. USEC, a former government-owned company known as U.S. Enrichment Corporation, was privatized in 1998, and has since suffered from serious financial woes. Against the wishes of the U.S. Government, USEC was forced to close its Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (which had been operating at one-quarter capacity) in Ohio, in June of 2000, leaving its Paducah, Kentucky plant (which is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy [DOE] and leased by USEC) as the only uranium enrichment facility in the country, which runs at about fifty-percent capacity. But now, USEC, in partnership with the DOE, is seeking to develop a new uranium enrichment plant to replace its aging Paducah plant.

USEC, now a private corporation, provides the lion’s share (about 68 percent in 2001) of enriched uranium to domestic nuclear power reactors. The remainder of enriched uranium is imported, and is subject to tariffs. But the large nuclear power companies—including Exelon, Entergy, and Duke, which are part of the LES consortium—want to secure ownership of a cheap, domestic source of enriched nuclear fuel so that they may further monopolize all stages of the nuclear fuel chain.

The foreign partners in the consortium also have an interest in sharing ownership in a plant in the U.S. Urenco, for example, must now pay an extra 3.7 percent duty on its exports to the U.S., as ordered in early 2002 by the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission, which found that Urenco and other foreign nuclear fuels providers had been dumping their products into the U.S. market at unfairly cheap prices.

The development of a new uranium enrichment facility would only serve to pad the profits of nuclear power utilities and nuclear fuels and services providers. The industry, no doubt, hopes that a new, vertically-integrated uranium enrichment operation would propel the development of new nuclear power plants by reducing the cost of fuel and making new nuclear plants more economically feasible.

THE HAZARDS OF URANIUM ENRICHMENT PLANTS
The nuclear power industry has engaged in a campaign to portray itself as a "green" source of power, claiming that its plants have only negligible emissions relative to the fossil fuel-burning energy plants. But the old saying holds true: "There is no such thing as a free lunch."

In addition to the toxic and radioactive waste that nuclear reactors produce—which is, of course, a very serious problem in its own right—the production of fuel for nuclear power plants is, in fact, an extremely energy-intensive process that is wrought with dangerous effluent pollutants at every step of the way. From mining to milling to conversion to enrichment, the nuclear fuel chain is dirty, dangerous, and potentially deadly.

Enrichment is the final step in the refinement process, required to convert uranium into fuel usable in commercial nuclear reactors. Prior to enrichment, uranium must be converted to a chemical form, uranium hexafluoride (UF6), which is both chemically toxic and radioactive. Moreover, UF6 can release a highly toxic hydrofluoric acid if it comes into contact with moisture. Enrichment facilities have had several serious accidents involving uranium hexafluoride. One such accident at the old Sequoyah Fuels conversion plant (which was in operation until 1993) in Gore, Oklahoma killed one worker and hospitalized 42 other workers and 100 nearby residents. Transportation of UF6 to and from the plant creates an additional hazard, which is compounded by the fact that the chosen site is accessible only by way of secondary, two-lane highways, which are not suitable for heavy truck traffic, and increase the likelihood of an accident, which could result in a serious and immediate health hazard to area residents.

Uranium enrichment facilities have a tarnished history of worker exploitation and extreme environmental irresponsibility. Lockheed Martin and Martin Marietta, operators of the Paducah plant in the 1980s and 1990s, are currently subject to a massive class-action lawsuit filed by former employees at the plant, who claim that they are suffering from illnesses and diseases caused by their exposure to toxic chemicals and radiation on the job. The plaintiffs claim that they were not made aware of the degree of danger involved in their occupations. On October 30, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the "Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act," which provides compensation to former DOE nuclear-complex workers and their families for medical expenses and suffering due to illness caused by the hazards to which they were unknowingly exposed in their occupations.

In addition to the hazards to which workers at Paducah were unknowingly exposed, the plant’s pollutants have also put the general public in harm’s way and defiled the local environment. According to a report in the Washington Post, the Paducah plant is responsible for the following abuses and acts of negligence:

• Radioactive contaminants from the plant routinely spilled into ditches and eventually seeped into creeks, a state-owned wildlife area, and private wells.
  
• Former workers at the Paducah plant claim that waste from the facility was deliberately dumped into nearby fields, abandoned buildings, and a landfill not licensed for hazardous waste.
  
• Between 1952 and 1987, 61,000 pounds of radioactive uranium flowed out of the plant with wastewater and into the Ohio River.
  
• In 1988, wells near the Paducah plant were discovered to be contaminated with technetium and chemical carcinogens, which prompted a multimillion-dollar groundwater cleanup under the oversight of the Environmental Protection Agency. (Eventual cleanup of the Paducah complex is expected to cost $240 billion and take at least 75 years.)

Compounding these flagrant acts of environmental irresponsibility is the massive amount of toxic and radioactive waste that such facilities produce on a day-to-day basis. The uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Paducah, Kentucky; and Portsmouth, Ohio have produced a total of 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium—a radioactive and toxic byproduct of nuclear fuel production—over the past half-century. This waste now sits in some 50,000 steel cylinders, each weighing about thirteen tons, stacked in huge piles outside the enrichment plants, where it has the potential to enter into the environment through leaks in the cylinders.

CONCLUSION
While the nuclear power industry has been in steep decline since the 1980s, the industry and its allies in the federal government—now buoyed by the pro-nuclear Bush Administration—are hoping to promote a "nuclear renaissance." For this reason, giants among the nuclear power corporations—such as Exelon, Entergy, and Duke—are investing in their own uranium enrichment facility through the LES consortium as a way to ensure a cheap source of fuel for their reactors. Their speculation into the uranium enrichment business is based on the assumption that new nuclear power plants (which will, of course, require great amounts of enriched uranium as fuel) will come on line in the near future. A new uranium enrichment plant would not only have disastrous environmental consequences in its immediate location, but it would, in fact, feed the nuclear power industry, which produces the most hazardous waste known to humankind.

We do not need to create a nuclear fuel facility to add to the mess created by the nuclear power industry. There is no reason to capitulate to this dying industry, desperately grasping at any opportunity to sustain itself with no regard for the extreme hazards it creates. We should invest in clean, safe, and renewable energy sources—such as wind and solar—in addition to increasing energy efficiency and practicing conservation. This is the path toward a sustainable energy source that will provide for generations to come as it provides for us.

RESOURCES

Public Interest Organizations

• Citizens for the Preservation of the Valley Beautiful. Conservation organization in Unicoi County, Tennessee, where LES backed out of its plans to construct a uranium enrichment facility because of opposition from this group and others.
• Citizens for Smart Chocies.  Local group in Hartsville, Tennessee, organized in opposition to the proposed LES uranium enrichment plant.
• Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS). National organization that assists local communities in their efforts to oppose the dangerous projects of the nuclear industry.
• Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER). Information and scientific research on the energy production and its environmental consequences.
• WISE (World Information Service on Energy), Uranium Project. Provides comprehensive information on the uranium enrichment process and its hazards.

Industry

• Urenco. Leader of the LES consortium and owner of three uranium enrichment facilities in Europe.
• USEC. Only domestic operator of a uranium enrichment facility.
• Exelon. Energy corporation and partner in the LES consortium.
• Entergy. Energy corporation and partner in the LES consortium.
• Duke Energy. Energy corporation and partner in the LES consortium.

Government

• Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). U.S. government agency responsible for the regulation of the nuclear industry.
• Department of Energy (DOE). U.S. government agency responsible for the regulation of the energy industry.
• Energy Information Administration. The DOE’s comprehensive resource site for energy information. A listing of the nuclear power station holdings of particular public utilities—such as Exelon, Entergy, and Duke—can be found here (as well as on the NRC website).

1. For more information on the process of uranium enrichment, see "Uranium: Its Uses and Hazards." Fact Sheet, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. http://www.ieer.org/fctsheet/uranium.html. 24 August 2000.

2. This figure includes the highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the former Soviet nuclear weapons stockpile that was "downblended" (meaning that it was reprocessed so that it is suitable for use in commercial nuclear reactors) by USEC under the U.S.-Russia "Megatons to Megawatts" nonproliferation agreement. Taken from "Owners and Operators of U.S. Civilian Nuclear Power Reactors Purchases of Enrichment Services by Origin and Delivery Year, 1997-2001." Uranium Industry Annual 2001: Table 25. Energy Information Administration, Department of Energy. May 2002. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/uia/table25.html.

3. Bredmeier, Kenneth. "A Nuclear Power Fissure; USEC’s Plans for Advanced Plant, Pacts with Russia Cause a Split in Energy Industry." Washington Post. Financial Section. 19 August 2002.

4. Warrick, Joby. "In Harm’s Way, And in the Dark; Workers Exposed to Plutonium at U.S. Plant." The Washington Post. A Section. 8 August 1999.

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