The Nuclear Energy Institute has come out in support of a legislative proposal to require the Department of Energy to establish a pilot program to re-enrich a portion of its inventory of depleted uranium hexafluoride tails, with the proceeds from the sale of the re-enriched material to be used for cleanup activities. “This bill provides predictability to domestic nuclear fuel suppliers on the rate at which U.S. government uranium inventories can enter the commercial markets, and helps convert currently unusable material into a productive asset,” NEI said in a letter sent Dec. 8 to Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), the bill’s main sponsor in the House. The proposal could be part of the omnibus funding bill for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2012 set to be unveiled early this week.
In the latest legislative proposal, which has circulated among Capitol Hill and nuclear industry officials in recent days, DOE would be required by March 1, 2012, to enter into a contract for up to two years for re-enrichment services. Funds raised through the sale of the re-enriched uranium would be placed into the federal uranium enrichment D&D fund. While earlier versions of the bill had sought to limit the re-enrichment work to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, operated by USEC, the latest version does away with the bulk of the language that had been seen as potential barriers for competitors such as URENCO USA to bid. The latest version of the bill does include a provision that would allow DOE to “sell the conversion component of uranium returned to the Secretary … separately from its uranium concentrates component.” The latest version of the proposal also maintains hard quantity caps on how much uranium DOE could sell, barter or transfer to others in a given year—no more than 6.5 million pounds annually during 2012-2015 and no more 5 million pounds annually post-2015—that had been included in a previous version.
