USEC OFFICIAL: COMPANY’S CRITICS ‘NOT RESTRAINED BY FACT’

By ExchangeMonitor

A senior USEC official yesterday brushed aside critics of government support for USEC’s American Centrifuge Project who have called into question the Administration’s national security arguments for providing the funds. “A lot of our critics have the luxury of not having to be restrained by fact. We as a public company working on these kinds of programs have to make sure that what we are out there talking about is accurate,” USEC Vice President and General Counsel Peter Saba said yesterday in a meeting with reporters at the USEC offices in Washington. Administration officials have repeatedly stressed that a domestic enrichment capacity is necessary because international agreements restrict the use of foreign technology to produce enriched uranium for tritium production. However some lawmakers and nonproliferation experts have called into question that interpretation, and suggested that USEC’s proposed plant will rely on some foreign produced components.

Saba responded to those concerns yesterday, saying that after initial questions USEC and the Administration proved that it has long been the government’s position not to rely on foreign technology for uranium enrichment by citing briefs filed on the subject by previous administrations. “So once that debate has been settled, because I’m not hearing that anymore, it became very clear that you can not use the foreign technology to meet the tritium needs, then all of a sudden the next fallacious argument that came up was that there was a foreign part,” Saba said. “Yeah, maybe there is a foreign screw or nut or bolt in the plant, but there is nothing that is subject to peaceful use restrictions or obligations that would prevent their use for national security purposes.”

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