UK MOVING AHEAD WITH URENCO SALE

The United Kingdom’s government has decided to move ahead with plans to sell its one-third stake in URENCO. The decision comes after the Netherlands government and the German utilities, which each own one-third of the uranium enrichment firm, also agreed to proceed with a potential sale. “Urenco is a world leading, high technology company with strong earnings and the time is right for government to sell its stake,” U.K. Business and Energy Minister Michael Fallon said in a statement yesterday. “It makes good commercial sense now and is consistent with our position that assets should be sold where ownership itself does not deliver any policy objective.” Fallon’s statement notes that the form, scale and timing for the planned sale are not yet decided, and that any change in ownership must be agreed to by shareholders and the German government. URENCO owns the URENCO USA plant, a uranium enrichment facility in New Mexico that is the main competitor of USEC’s American Centrifuge Plant.