Uranium enrichment competition

[pscot]

could create a million new hi-tech jos in the U.S. USEC Inc. revives a tehnology abandoned in 1986. French and Australian firms want a piece of the action.


http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/05/04/04climatewire-a-robust-new-fuel-supply-for-nuclear-power-p-12208.html

....first prototypes of that centrifuge, called the "American centrifuge," are up and running. A new generation of engineers hover over their computers, making the refinements needed to produce an estimated 11,500 of the machines by 2012 to form what engineers call a "cascade," or a plant that produces enriched uranium.


Rebuilt with super high-strength carbon fiber components and fashioned by computers and robotics not even imagined in 1985, the machine is the U.S.-built centerpiece for a high stakes, five-way race to see who will dominate the globe's nuclear fuel business.


Its sponsor is USEC Inc., the private, Bethesda, Md.-based company that was spun out of the U.S. Department of Energy's old uranium enrichment program in 1998. If USEC succeeds in getting a $2 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, it says it will build "the most advanced uranium enrichment machine in the world." The company says it has already signed up 10 customers for the plant that want $3.3 billion worth of fuel.


According to the nuclear industry, there are at least 60 new nuclear power plants either under construction or being planned around the world. USEC, which currently produces the nuclear fuel that feeds about a third of the world's nuclear plants and half of the U.S. market, will be in a fight to keep market share as the world's demand for nuclear fuel expands.(more)

[jpak]

1. I heard they done used aluminum tubes imported from I-raq to make them thar thangs

Yee Haw!!111

[pscot]

2. Nah. It's all done with buckyballs

This is not your fathers uranium reprocessing plant.

[phantom power]

3. Enrichment... is like a series of tubes.