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USEC is threatening to begin demobilizing its American Centrifuge Project in August if the Dept. of Energy doesn't move forward with a commtiment on a loan guarantee, and elected officials from Tennessee and Ohio are asking Energy Secretary Steven Chu to intervene directly in the matter. A letter signed by Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, and U.S. Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and George Voinovich, R-Ohio, was sent to Chu this week. The officials said the American Centrifuge project would solidify American's leadership in uranium-enrichment technology and create about 8,000 jobs across the country. All that is being threatened because of delays on the loan guarantees, they wrote.

The Department of Energy has denied USEC Inc.'s application for a $2 billion loan guarantee, and the company has started "demobilizing" the American Centrifuge Project, which currently employs about 450 at its Oak Ridge manufacturing site. "There will be layoffs," USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle said this morning. However, the number and the timing of those layoffs has not been determined, she said..

Members of a committee helping to oversee cleanup of nuclear waste at the site of the now-closed Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant here met with their counterparts who worked with the cleanup of the former Feed Material Production Center in Fernald, near Cincinnati. The Fernald plant, built by the Atomic Energy Commission, produced more than 500 million pounds of uranium metal from 1952 to 1989, said Johnny Reising, site director for the Fernald closing project for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Cleanup of the radioactive waste byproducts, stored in metal cylinders above ground, began in the 1980s and, after nearly 25 years, is now completed. The cost was nearly $4.5 billion.

A group of U.S. engineers and technicians sat down one day in 2001 to figure out where the nation's future nuclear power plant fuel was going to come from. Their decision was to leap backward 30 years and re-engineer an idea perfected during the Cold War and then abandoned here in 1985. The technology -- an ultra-high-speed, 40-foot-high centrifuge that can produce enriched uranium -- was hunted down in government archives. At first, it was an adventure in industrial archaeology. "All the drawings and the specs were in a vault at [the National Laboratory] at Oak Ridge [Tenn.]," explained Daniel W. Rogers, who became general manager of the resurrected program. "We spent a year looking at them."