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The U.S. Energy Department said on Tuesday it has agreed to delay the final review of USEC Inc's (USU.N) application for a loan guarantee to fund a new uranium enrichment processing plant. "The additional time will allow USEC to make efforts to fully address issues DOE has identified relating to the readiness of the company's uranium enrichment technology," the department said. Last month, the department asked USEC to pull its loan request for the planned American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is rushing to meet an April 2 deadline to turn over stacks of internal documents on a recent reclassification of depleted uranium. Advertisement The NRC now considers it the least hazardous type of low-level radioactive waste, even in large quantities. Members of Congress have demanded the documents because they believe the agency's March 18 decision disregards the risk to public health. The change would allow federal facilities and companies around the country to dispose of more than 1 million tons of depleted uranium in Utah and Texas.

The Department of Energy (DOE) last week released a request for proposals (RFP) for a contractor to perform Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride (DUF6) Operations at the two DUF6 conversion facilities at Piketon and Paducah, Kentucky. The procurement will be for a single contractor to be awarded two cost-plus-award-fee contracts. The contract period will be for five years with a total estimated cost for the two contracts of $350-450 million. These facilities will convert DOE's inventory of DUF6, located at the Portsmouth and Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plants, into a stable chemical form that will be acceptable for transportation, reuse or disposal. The contractor will also provide cylinder surveillance and maintenance of the DUF6, low-enrichment uranium hexafluoride (UF6) and natural assay UF6 as well as empty the cylinders that store the DUF6 in a safe and environmentally acceptable manner. The contracts are expected to be awarded in 2010

Despite the promise of thousands of jobs in this hard-hit part of Appalachia, some community members are skeptical as Duke Energy considers building a nuclear power plant at a former uranium enrichment plant here. Advertisement "Myself and a few other members are disillusioned and upset," said Lorry Swain, a South Shore, Ky., resident who serves on a 20-member community panel formed last year to give the Department of Energy environmental cleanup advice at the site. She said the panel, created under federal law to increase local input around decisions at the 3,700-acre Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion plant, didn't learn about Duke's proposal until a few days before it was announced on June 18. With a great deal of fanfare, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, U.S. Sen. George Voinovich and Duke Energy Chairman James Rogers announced the formation of the Southern Ohio Clean Energy Park Alliance to pursue development of the Midwest's first nuclear power plant in decades. The plan comes under an Energy Department initiative to convert former government weapons sites to clean-energy alternatives.

* Says commitments from 10 customers * Customers include utilities in Asia, Europe, North America March 27 (Reuters) - Uranium fuel supplier USEC Inc (USU.N) said it had commitments worth $3.3. billion from 10 customers for a substantial portion of production at its American centrifuge plant. The commitments from customers, including utilities in the United States, Europe and Asia, represent both accepted offers and signed contracts, which are of varying length extending as far as 2026, USEC said. The centrifuge plant is being constructed in Piketon, Ohio, and the company has already invested more than $1.2 billion on it.

Job-starved southern Ohioans are being promised a shiny new nuclear plant. But the announcement has come with a cruel reminder, and the scent of a desperate hoax. Using the gargantuan corpse of the shuttered Portsmouth-Piketon uranium enrichment plant as his backdrop, U.S. Senator George Voinovich (R-OH) punctuated his enthusiastic endorsement the new nuke by proclaiming that, with his support, the US government has paid thousands of Ohio workers hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the health damage they suffered from being irradiated while working there. What was he thinking?

"Although the contents of the two documents are not yet revealed, the US Department of Energy and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) have retrieved data on the Huntington Pilot Plant (HPP) from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory vault. The US Department of Energy operated the Huntington Pilot Plant on the same ground as International Nickel (INCO) in Huntington from the mid-50s until the early 60s performing various activities in conjunction with one or more of the DOE's gaseous diffusion plants in Portsmouth (Ohio), Oak Ridge (Tennessee) and Pad (Ky). After remaining in a state of readiness until 1978, the DOE ordered that the plant be demolished. By 1979, all but the ground floor of the plant (now used as a Waste Water Treatment facility by INCO's successor, Special Metals), were demolished and buried in a classified and secret ditch at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, including even the railroad cars and trucks used to transport the debris. Based on their exposure to such radioactive contaminants as uranium, nickel, plutonium and other metals, workers at the former DOE plant are eligible for compensation. "

The U.S. Enrichment Corp. and Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services today announced plans to form a joint venture known as American Centrifuge Manufacturing LLC, which will become the lead organization in production of machines for the new uranium-enrichment plant at Piketon, Ohio. According to Elizabeth Stuckle, the USEC spokeswoman at headquarters in Maryland, the partnership will be a 55/45 pecentage arrangement with USEC holding 55 percent of the newly formed company that will manage the manufacturing program that ultimately will produce 11,500 machines -- and perhaps more if there's an expanded enrichment facility. "This means all manufacturing suppliers who are manufacturing parts for the American Centrifiuge plant will report up through this joint venture," Stuckle said. B&W Technnical Services Clinch River has been a manufacturer of components for the centrifuges under a contract with USEC since 2007. Now the partnership will be managing that work as well as other manufacturing activities for the AC100 machines in West Virginia, etc..

"The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has approved a new component to clean-up efforts at the U.S. Department of Energy's former Gaseous Diffusion Plant. On Tuesday, the state EPA said it has approved plans from the U.S. Department of Energy that will allow proper cleanup and, in some cases, tearing down of buildings that were used to produce enriched uranium until 2001. Currently, the Department of Energy is conducting cleanup of soil and water at the site under a 1989 agreement, but the new agreement allows it to begin decontamination and decommissioning work in the buildings on the site as well. The Energy department committed $303 million in cleanup funds for 2010, and an additional $118 million was awarded from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown's office said $500 million is set aside for cleanup efforts in the 2011 Energy department budget."

A multibillion-dollar nuclear power plant proposed for southern Ohio would be the first started in the U.S. since before the Three Mile Island accident. "I'm a big cheerleader for nuclear power, and I always have been," Gov. Ted Strickland told The Dispatch. "I'm excited about it." Strickland and representatives from an alliance of energy companies will be in Piketon Thursday morning for the formal announcement by Duke Energy and the French nuclear energy company Areva. Sen. George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Loveland, also will be on hand.

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.

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."

USEC Inc. has completed its review of the cost and schedule for the American Centrifuge Plant and affirmed its previously disclosed estimate of completing the project at $3.5 billion, which includes amounts spent to date but excludes financing costs and financial assurance.