DOE Agrees to Sell Uranium to Enrichment Venture at Paducah

By ExchangeMonitor

The Energy Department announced Thursday it has agreed to sell depleted uranium to a company that plans to build a $1 billion uranium enrichment facility near the agency’s Paducah Site in Kentucky.

The company, GE-Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment (GLE), still bears the GE-Hitachi brand, despite that joint venture’s exit from the Global Laser Enrichment project earlier this year. GLE plans to build a plant in which depleted uranium would be used in production of natural uranium, which can be put to work in making nuclear reactor fuel, according to DOE’s press release. The company’s website said only that “negotiations continue” on the proposed facility.

The Energy Department’s press release did not say how much depleted uranium it agreed to sell to GLE, at what price, or when sales might begin.

The department is converting more than 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) at facilities at Paducah and the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.

The new facility is forecast to produce 800 to 1,200 local jobs via construction and operation, DOE said.

“This agreement furthers the Energy Department’s environmental cleanup mission while reducing cleanup costs, creating good local jobs, and supporting an economical enrichment enterprise for our energy needs,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in the release. “The sale contributes to two key Energy Department mission areas – to fulfill the federal government’s responsibility to manage the safe storage and disposal of nuclear material and to enable nuclear power, America’s largest source of zero-carbon energy and an important enabler for reduced greenhouse gas emissions.”

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