American Centrifuge Plant

Older nuke project at risk Piketon enrichment plant needs feds' help Sunday,  June 21, 2009 3:29 AM By Jonathan Riskind THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH WASHINGTON -- Even as an announcement of a plan for a nuclear-power plant was celebrated last week in Piketon, Ohio, a uranium-enrichment plant project on the same site that is to begin operating by 2011 teetered on financial collapse. Announced 5 1/2 years ago with almost as much hoopla as the proposed nuclear project got last week, plans for the $3.5 billion enrichment plant could be dashed unless the Obama administration soon approves a $2 billion federal loan guarantee, says USEC, the suburban-Washington company slated to build the facility. USEC applied for the loan guarantee 10 months ago under a $38.5 billion Department of Energy program launched by the Bush administration to encourage various renewable-energy and nuclear-power ventures. An enrichment plant makes material that fuels nuclear-power plants. The company, which closed a Cold War-era plant at Piketon in 2001 but still operates an older facility in Kentucky, says it has spent about $1.4 billion on the new, advanced-technology Piketon plant -- including the construction of a demonstration enrichment facility that it says is working well. But without the $2 billion federal loan guarantee behind the project, USEC won't be able to obtain private financing, company officials say. Work on the plant has slowed, and the prospect of mothballing it isn't far off, said Elizabeth Stuckle, a USEC spokeswoman. She declined to specify when the project could be shut down. As late as February, USEC had said it would start operating the enrichment plant by late 2010. But that estimate has been pushed back to 2011, and USEC recently laid off workers employed by one of its construction contractors, Fluor. Overall, the project employs 5,700 directly or indirectly; jobs range from construction of the plant in Piketon to work on the enrichment-facility components and supplies in eight states, Stuckle said. In Piketon, more than 600 are working, and a fully operating plant would employ about 400 for years to come, Stuckle said. But the cost is rising with every month the project is delayed because of a lack of additional financing, Stuckle said. "If it continues to delay the project itself could be in jeopardy, along with thousands of jobs in Ohio and across the country," Stuckle said. "This is a serious time issue. We cannot get enough funding absent the loan guarantee." Rob Portman, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate and a former congressman from Cincinnati whose district includes Piketon, recently wrote to President Barack Obama urging that the loan guarantee be granted quickly. Obama himself was supportive when he campaigned in southern Ohio last year. "I will work with the Department of Energy to help make loan guarantees available for this (the Piketon enrichment plant) and other advanced-energy programs that reduce carbon emissions and break the tie to high cost, foreign energy sources," Obama wrote to Gov. Ted Strickland last year. Strickland, along with three other governors in states with jobs related to the USEC project, wrote to Obama in March, saying that "without timely approval of the loan guarantee, the many thousands of new jobs currently being created will be delayed or perhaps lost." In February, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said he intended to speed up the process of approving loan guarantees. But only one has been issued: In late March, Chu's department signed off on a $535 million loan guarantee for a solar-panel manufacturing plant to be built by California-based Solyndra. Energy department officials did not return calls last week.