Fresh Capital in the Uranium Fuel Race

[phantom power]

95% -- wonder what that does to the EROI ?

For decades, the business of enriching uranium for use in nuclear reactors was simple: companies bought the uranium and sent it to one of the plants built by the federal government as part of its nuclear weapons program. The government increased the proportion of uranium 235, the kind that splits easily in reactors.

But in the 1990s, the government sold the plants to the United States Enrichment Company, now called USEC. Meanwhile, other companies started looking at the American market.

In June, a company using European centrifuge technology — far more modern than the World War II-era system used by the United States Department of Energy and inherited by USEC — opened a plant near Eunice, N.M., on the Texas border. Industry experts hailed it as part of a “nuclear renaissance.” And in May, the Energy Department gave a $2 billion loan guarantee to a French firm, Areva, to build an enrichment plant in Idaho. That plant will also use centrifuge technology.

USEC, meanwhile, is trying to modernize and use centrifuges, which cut the amount of electricity required to enrich uranium by about 95 percent. But it has had trouble getting a loan guarantee or finding American companies willing to invest heavily enough.

Now the Japanese are buying in.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/fresh-capital-in-the-uranium-fuel-race/