Fluor May Help Build First Private Uranium Enrichment Plant in U.S.
Irvine-based Fluor Corp. said Thursday that it expects to enter a joint venture to build and operate the nation’s first privately owned uranium enrichment plant.
Fluor officials said they have been in discussions for several months with Duke Power Co. of Charlotte, N.C., and Urenco, a British-based consortium, on whether to build a uranium enrichment facility.
A decision is not expected until the end of the year, but Leslie G. McCraw, Fluor’s president, said Thursday that while a lot of details have yet to be worked out, he believes the project will go ahead and that Fluor will be part of it. “It looks good for us,” he said.
Uranium enrichment is an essential step in preparing uranium for use as a fuel in almost all nuclear power plants. While companies of mixed private and government ownership perform the uranium enrichment process overseas, the Department of Energy has a monopoly on uranium enrichment in the United States.
Joe Maher, spokesman for Duke Power Co., said the utility believes that private enterprise and competition in the uranium enrichment industry will promote lower nuclear fuel prices and ultimately lower electric bills for Duke’s customers. He said the price charged for uranium enrichment in Europe is about about 17% less than that charged by the Department of Energy.
Gene Schmidt, deputy director of the DOE office of business operations, said there are no laws barring private ventures into the uranium enrichment business in the United States.
The government’s licensing requirements, he said, would safeguard against any misuse of the technology, which was first developed during World War II to build nuclear weapons.
Schmidt said he believes that private investors have been discouraged from entering the market by high capital costs and the uncertain future of the nuclear power industry--which in recent years has been stymied by safety and economic concerns and a lengthy regulatory approval process.
Schmidt said that for years the DOE has searched for a private buyer for its uranium processing business but hasn’t received an adequate offer. He said he believes the business is not an attractive acquisition because it has not operated profitably as a government program.
Maher said that numerous issues still have to be addressed in the Fluor-Duke-Urenco discussions--including financing, licensing and the specific roles and responsibilities of the participants--before a decision is made whether to proceed.
McCraw said the proposed project is “a natural extension of the services we (Fluor) have done in the industry.” He said that Fluor, an engineering and construction company, has experience in the construction of nuclear power plants through its principal subsidiary, Fluor Daniel.
In addition, he said, Fluor provides engineering and maintenance services for nuclear power plants. Some of the utility companies that are Fluor’s clients, he said, are potential buyers of enriched uranium that would be processed at the joint-venture facility.
If the group agrees to invest in the project, Maher said, the new processing plant should be operating by 1996. He said that Duke Power has given notice to cancel its contract with the Department of Energy in that year.
Maher said no site has been selected for the proposed project and declined to say what part of the country is preferred, how the plant’s ownership would be structured or how much the plant would cost to build.
A report published in April by the Times of London placed the cost at $500 million.
Uranium enrichment involves increasing the concentration of uranium 235 isotope found in natural uranium. That is done by removing a portion of the more prevalent uranium 238.
A greater percentage of U-235 is desirable because that is the isotope that splits to sustain the chain reaction necessary for a nuclear power plant. Heat from the energy released as atoms split is used to boil water that creates steam to drive a generating plant’s turbines.
Less Expensive to Run
Maher said the enrichment plant would be of the gas centrifuge variety Urenco has been building and operating in Europe. A centrifuge plant would consume only about 5% of the electricity used by the Energy Department’s gas diffusion-type plant, and thus would be less expensive to operate, he said.
A centrifuge plant spins uranium gas in order to separate out the heavier uranium 238 isotope, while a gas diffusion process accomplishes the same result by driving the uranium gas through thousands of filters.
The United States has lagged in development of a private uranium enrichment industry, Maher said, because utilities in the United States long have been able to depend on the service provided by the federal government.
