DUEL COMMERCIAL, DEFENSE MISSION FOR USEC TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONED

By ExchangeMonitor

With the immediate future of USEC and its American Centrifuge Project secured for the time being through a financial lifeline earlier this month from the Department of Energy, the discussion has begun to shift to the longer-term pathway for the program and the best strategy to ensure the United States has a domestic supply of enriched uranium with which to produce tritium for the nuclear weapons program. The Department of Energy has taken a duel track to aid USEC in recent weeks, organizing a five-party uranium tails transfer that will allow the company to operate its Paducah gaseous diffusion plant for another year and moving to fund an R&D program to further develop USEC’s American Centrifuge Project. Both actions were taken under the auspices of national security, but at a Center for Strategic and International Studies discussion yesterday, Jonathon Epstein, majority staffer for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said concerns arise when the U.S. government supports commercialization of an enrichment technology that will also be used for military purposes. “If we encourage domestic enrichment, we should probably have a fence around it and put up a sign here that it is for military purposes,” he said. He said that the issue becomes particularly difficult when looking at Iran’s nuclear program. “We have this habit of putting one hat on and saying it’s military and putting another hat on and saying it’s civilian. I think at the end of the day if you get into that mode, if it’s a country like Iran… we should set be setting a pretty clear standard here.”

URENCO, which operates a competing uranium enrichment plant in New Mexico and is jointly owned by the governments of the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands, has proposed providing uranium for tritium production, but the Administration has concluded that international agreements prohibit such a move and that it is necessary from a national security perspective not to depend on foreign entities to provide the uranium for defense purposes. However, URENCO Inc. President and CEO Kirk Schnoebelen emphasized in his comments at the CSIS discussion yesterday that if that is the government’s perspective, other portions of the fuel cycle should be examined as well. “The fact that you have an enrichment plant in the U.S. doesn’t mean you have uranium resources. It just means you have a piece in the nuclear fuel cycle chain, Schnoebelen said. “Fuel fabrication is another example. We don’t enrich air. Fuel fabrication plants don’t fabricate fuel without enriched uranium. As far as relying on foreign companies to supply fuel to produce tritium, Westinghouse manufactures all the fuel that goes to Watts Bar.” TVA’s Watts Bar reactor is used to produce tritium, and Westinghouse is more than 80 percent owned by Japan’s Toshiba, while the Kazakh company Kazatomprom also owns a stake.

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