That leaves Congress with a stark choice. It can either risk millions or billions of dollars to keep the company viable, or it will have to rely on domestic inventories and foreign-owned suppliers for a service that is crucial both to maintaining the country’s nuclear arsenal and for running its 104 nuclear power reactors.
The company, USEC, which formerly stood for United States Enrichment Corporation and was spun off by the government as a private company in 1998, runs a plant in Paducah, Ky., that uses 1940s technology to sort the two dominant types of uranium so the enriched product can be used as reactor fuel.
On the site of an old, shuttered factory in Piketon, Ohio, the company is trying to build a new one that would use giant centrifuges. Modern nuclear programs, from France to Russia to Iran, now use centrifuges because they consume about 95 percent less electricity per unit of sorting work.
For years, USEC has been seeking a $2 billion loan guarantee, but the Energy Department was reluctant to back it. And that was before the Solyndra bankruptcy cast a harsh light on the risks the government was taking to support private energy projects.
The Piketon project, though, has scrambled the usual balance of partisan politics. Even harsh critics of the Solyndra loan, including John Boehner, the Ohio Republican and speaker of the House, are demanding that the government come through with the loan. Piketon is about 100 miles from Mr. Boehner’s district.
The Obama administration is now asking Congress for a compromise that would give USEC $300 million for further development of its centrifuges, and allow the company to demonstrate that they are durable enough to warrant a full-scale plant.
Those opposed to the loan guarantee say there is not enough of a market for the product to justify another enrichment technology at such a heavy cost.
Henry D. Sokolski, the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said Piketon was not a good bargain for taxpayers. “This thing has got more than nine lives, and none of them are worth living,” he said. “It will not do to whine about Solyndra and wink at this.”
But the company, based in Bethesda, Md., points out that it provides nuclear fuel to one reactor for which foreign fuel or fuel from a foreign-owned company cannot substitute, because of rules against nuclear weapons proliferation.
That reactor, a civilian one owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, is used by the Energy Department to make tritium, a perishable material for nuclear bombs. (Submarine and aircraft carrier reactors can use highly enriched uranium from old inventories, some of it left over from decommissioned weapons.)
There is also the anxiety over the United States not being self-reliant. “How much more technology are we going to lose?” said Andrew C. Kadak, a senior nuclear expert who was formerly the head of a nuclear power company and later a professor at M.I.T. “There’s a policy question that needs to be answered: do we as a nation want to be independent of foreign sources of energy?”
Others are pushing support for USEC as a measure that will support American jobs and competitiveness. “I don’t understand why the government hasn’t provided a loan guarantee to USEC,” said Jim H. Key, the vice president of the United Steelworkers chapter that represents the workers at Paducah. The plant employs about 1,200 people. “I can’t see us as a country ever putting ourselves in a situation where we have to rely on a foreign country for another source for our energy needs,” he said.
USEC’s long-term future is in doubt for several reasons.
The company has kept itself afloat for 20 years in part by acting as the agent for the United States government in a deal with the Russians, to take uranium from former Soviet nuclear weapons and blend it down to a level useful in power reactors. But that deal comes to an end in 2013, and the American utilities have been discussing signing supply contracts directly with Russia, which would reduce their reliance on USEC.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a6ed03b8f28e0b55980c2d2bc3adb88e
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