ABQjournal: Netherlands Nuclear Plant Is the Model for N.M.
By Harry Moskos, Of the Journal
Herald Voschezang says New Mexicans need not fret over stored waste from Louisiana Energy Services’ proposed $1.2 billion nuclear fuel factory in Lea County.
“There is no issue regarding waste,” Voschezang said as we walked through Urenco’s seven-building, 55-acre uranium enrichment facility in Almelo, located near the German border and about a 90-minute rail ride from Amsterdam. I was in Amsterdam in July, en route to Greece, and took a tour of the plant.
Urenco, with two similar plants in Great Britain and Germany, supplies about 19 percent of the worldwide nuclear power refining needs. The company describes itself as an independent, global group using its own centrifuge technology to do uranium refining for power generation.
The LES plant proposed for New Mexico near Eunice would be patterned after the Almelo plant and would be the first centrifuge uranium refinery in the United States. It would refine uranium for use as nuclear power plant fuel. …
LES would like to start construction next summer with a late-2008 completion date. The New Mexico plant would be the fourth in Urenco’s international network.
Voschezang, one of five shift managers at Almelo, said he sees no problems with storing waste in steel cylinders on site, as they do at Almelo.
“You may store them in my back garden. I have no problem with that,” he said as we looked over an open field with several hundred of the containers.
It is the storage of those cylinders containing uranium waste? “tails”? that is causing consternation in New Mexico. The New Mexico plant would generate about 8,000 tons of radioactive waste annually.
“Leakage is no discussion,” Voschezang added. “The enriched part of the uranium is used to make fuel, and you have the depleted part and that’s the tails. And that is what is in the barrels and they can be stored safely.” …
Each cylinder at the New Mexico plant would be 4 feet in diameter and 8 feet long. The cylinders would contain uranium hexaflouride, a substance that resembles rock salt. …
The New Mexico plant will employ about 210, including security, in the operation of the plant. This would be in addition to construction crews.
“Don’t worry,” Voschezang said, about having a facility that will process uranium for use as fuel in nuclear power plants. “And especially when you see the distances in New Mexico. Here, we are only two kilometers to the center of Almelo.”
Harry Moskos can be reached at 823-3837 or hmoskos@ abqjournal.com.
Did you read the Journal’s glowing account of the company that will build a dangerous nuclear processing plant in New Mexico? Didn’t it sound wonderful? I suggest you read the Sierra Club article about the same company — Urenco. Not nearly as chearleady. peace, mjh
Nuclear Proliferation Article Main Page – Sierra Magazine, May/June 2005 – Sierra Club
Sierra Magazine
Dangerous Liaisons
from the May/June issue of Sierra Magazine
The company whose nuclear secrets leaked to Iran and North Korea now wants to bring its know-how to New Mexico. What will be the fallout? …
Three decades ago, a brilliant young Pakistani metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan managed to steal highly classified nuclear secrets while working in Amsterdam. It was a theft that would first shake Pakistan’s Chagai Hills test site, and ultimately the rest of the planet. Working for a firm that contracted with Urenco, a Dutch-German-British company that provides uranium-enrichment services to nuclear power plants, Khan had access to Urenco’s secret blueprints and manuals. He learned how to enrich uranium in centrifuges to make fuel for nuclear power plants but also for weapons. He took what he learned back to Pakistan, enriched uranium at the Dr. A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories, and helped his country build its first nuclear bomb. …
Centrifuge plants, of which there are only a handful worldwide, can also be easily and covertly retooled to produce weapons-grade uranium, the key component in nuclear warheads. …
The problem is that no one knows whether the 21st-century Urenco has plugged its security leaks.
“[Urenco’s] technology was stolen a long time ago and a lot has changed since then,” says Bruce Moran, an NRC staffer who monitors international nuclear safety. When asked to explain exactly what Urenco had done to ensure that its classified nuclear secrets were secure, a Urenco spokesperson told me that since the New Mexico plant will be an “LES enrichment facility,” I would need to speak with LES (even though, according to an LES spokesperson, the centrifuges will be assembled on-site by Urenco security-cleared contractors). I then asked LES vice president Marshall Cohen what had changed since A. Q. Khan’s day to close security loopholes. Cohen didn’t know offhand but repeatedly assured me, in calls, by e-mail, and in person, his company would provide an answer. It never did. …
In Hobbs, New Mexico, a boom/bust oil town of 28,000, the public is noticeably absent from February public hearings before the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, which will recommend whether to license the LES plant. City officials are solidly behind the idea, and local residents are desperate for new jobs. “Very few people have gone to these public hearings,” says Rose Gardner. “They trust our leaders to make the right decisions.” Gardner, 46, owns Desert Rose Flowers and Gifts in the tiny town of Eunice, 20 miles from Hobbs and 5 miles from the proposed site. On the first day of the weeklong hearings, she and retired Hobbs businessman Lee Cheney are the only members of the audience not associated with either the media or LES. …
“Congress is taking a basically hands-off approach; that LES is a private enterprise and under NRC jurisdiction so there’s no point in intervening,” he says. To the degree that there has been intervention, it has been boosterism on the part of Pete Domenici (R-N.Mex.), the powerful chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. In 2003, the senator pledged to aid LES by working “at all levels to help get through the long permit and regulatory process.” He then praised LES partner Urenco and its history of uranium enrichment in Europe. Of Urenco’s past performance, he added, “We can expect as much here.” …
Senator Domenici is an old friend of the energy industry. He was the top Senate recipient of money from electric utilities (which include nuclear power plants) during the 2002 election cycle. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he received more than $175,000 from electric utilities alone, and more than $400,000 from the energy and natural-resources sector overall.
In interviews with the Santa Fe New Mexican, Domenici has expressed a desire to create a “nuclear corridor” along a 60-mile stretch of the Texas-New Mexico border, where radioactive waste dumps and the LES facility would support existing nuclear power plants and new plants around the country. Though no new nuclear power plants have been ordered since 1978, plans are now in the pipeline to relicense 18 reactors at 9 power plants nationwide. The LES centrifuge project would fuel the renaissance.