THE FATEFUL CHOICE IN URANIUM ENRICHMENT
Moore, Taylor G.
The fateful choice in uranium enrichment Nuclear power's backstage battle Taylor G. Moore III Clayton D. Zerby, a round, friendly man, sounds like the mayor of a fair-sized town when, with a...
...share of the non-Communist nuclear power export market, once almost total, has now shrunk below 14 per cent...
...But today the coal boom the plants helped revive is sending the cost of enrichment ever higher...
...As late as 1974, enrichment costs were $36 per SWU, or about $3.6 million for a year's reactor operation...
...The hundreds of giant steel process stages in a gaseous diffusion plant contain thousands of miles of porous tubing or barrier material...
...Carter and the Department of Energy reportedly had hoped to delay such a decision until at least the end of next year...
...The research, most of it begun since the early 1970s, is fast approaching prototype operation...
...The Government, selling enrichment services "at cost," charges nuclear fuel users only about half of what the industry might otherwise pay...
...So the industry is pressing for new enrichment facilities despite official projections of lower enrichment sales over the next decade...
...While few could tell you much about the "gaseous diffusion" process and the role it plays in producing atomic power and atomic bombs, no one doubts its impact on the economy of the region...
...Specifically, it represents the amount of energy required to boost a kilogram of natural uranium from a U-235 content of 0.7 per cent to 3 per cent U-235...
...While the gaseous diffusion process can be duplicated on a laboratory scale, the enormous size of the plants and the tremendous amounts of electricity they require have thus far served as a brake on nuclear weapons production by all except the most heavily industrialized nations...
...They are being made now, in laboratories remote from public view, in governmental offices encrusted by bureaucratic habit, and in corporate boardrooms ever alert to the opportunities for a financial killing...
...Exxon and its partner, Avco Everett Research Laboratory, have already spent $50 million on a laser separation test lab near the Hanford Atomic Reservation at Richland, Washington...
...Yet in many ways it will be a bellwether of this nation's nuclear technology policy, for the industry cannot hope to expand at any significant rate without ample, assured supplies of enriched fissile ore...
...A laser plant would still require significant amounts of power even for a small-scale operation...
...Some of the buildings resemble vast airplane hangars, big enough for an endless row of giant bombers stacked five high...
...domestic needs and maintain the present share of the foreign market through the year 2000...
...The future of enrichment technology is neither the greatest nor the least of these...
...Perfection of large-scale gaseous diffusion proved to be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the effort to build the first atomic bomb...
...In the post-Korean war commitment to develop peaceful applications of nuclear science, the secrets of gaseous diffusion enabled the American reactor manufacturers, then principally Westinghouse Corporation and General Electric Company, to grab an early lead in the world reactor market with their light-water design and an assured supply of U.S.-enriched uranium fuel...
...But Clayton Zerby's town, you soon discover, is more like a technological land of Oz...
...Four fourteen-ton cylinders arrive at the plant gates on an average day, bearing the product of thousands of tons of uranium ore that has been mined, milled, and converted to uranium hex-afluoride gas...
...Those who must foot the bill for the higher costs are the customers of utilities that produce electricity from nuclear power...
...The company's method, he says, "is technologically difficult, diverse and inherently proliferation-proof...
...A year after the Senate's defeat of the Ford-Bechtel plan, the Department of Energy announced it would build next to the Piketon plant a multi-million dollar facility employing a more sophisticated, less energy-intensive separation process: the gas centrifuge...
...TRW, Inc., is spending about $9 million a year under DOE contract on a laser enrichment method...
...The tubes must be made to withstand constant use under high temperatures and pressure, and must resist the effects of the "hex" gas, which will corrode almost anything...
...The three sites, chosen for their proximity to large supplies of electricity and water, helped transform this economic backwater into the fuel production center for the far-flung nuclear industry...
...With support from the Ford Administration, a consortium headed by Bechtel Corp., one of the world's largest engineering and construction firms — a giant in the nuclear building trade — urged the Government to end its long monopoly in the enrichment business and help underwrite a commercial gaseous diffusion plant...
...Today the TVA — the nation's largest nuclear utility and the biggest buyer of Kentucky coal — has become the chief power supplier for all three uranium enrichment plants...
...The common denominator of enrichment costs is the Separative Work Unit, or SWU (pronounced swoo...
...Environmental Protection Agency and the states of Kentucky and Tennessee, has agreed to install costly "scrubber" devices to reduce the high sulfur-dioxide emissions from its coal-fired plants...
...As the U.S...
...too seems eager to play a role in expanding enrichment capability...
...Two developments now in the offing could completely alter the present outlook, however...
...The pores allow the lighter molecules of U-235 in the pressurized uranium gas to pass through the barriers more readily than their heavier atomic cousins...
...The economic and military ramifications of that are staggering...
...The gaseous diffusion process is riddled with ironies, not the least of which is its dependence on nuclear power's closest economic rival — coal...
...at nearby Metropolis, Illinois, and by Kerr-McGee Corp...
...Last year, Exxon began an intense campaign, as England described it, "to shape a political situation that will permit us to move forward" with a laser commercial enrichment facility...
...Although uranium enrichment represents only about 5 per cent of the total cost of building and operating a standard American power reactor today, the skyrocketing costs of uranium ore and enrichment are further eroding the fuel cost advantage nuclear proponents have long claimed over coal...
...Critics argued such a plan represented another Government giveaway to the nuclear industry, noting it would be the taxpayer, not Bechtel or UEA, who would pay if the plant did not turn a profit...
...The Paducah uranium plant uses more electricity than all of Kentucky's other industries combined...
...Gaseous diffusion increases the concentration of Uranium-235, the isotope needed for fission power, from the natural seven-tenths of 1 per cent to a richness of 3 to 4 per cent for nuclear reactors, of 90 per cent for nuclear bombs...
...And they are ready to plow in another $50 million for a small-scale experimental facility...
...A ten-year projection is made in calculating the charge necessary to recover the Government's cost...
...The greatest portion of the 18 per cent jump is due to the present slump in nuclear power growth...
...The $13 billion complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee...
...The buildings shake with the roar of thousands of motor-driven giant turbocompressors...
...The enrichment work capacity of the three gaseous diffusion plants is 17.2 million SWUs per year...
...As the cost of coal and the electricity generated by it goes up, so does the cost of nuclear fuel for atomic power reactors...
...Furthermore, TVA, under pressure from the U.S...
...The object is to ensure a steady supply of fuel for present and planned U.S...
...All the country's uranium fuel enriched by this method comes first to the Paducah plant to begin the laborious and expensive process pioneered by Army scientists in World War II...
...share of a world uranium fuel market...
...Most of the shipments come from conversion plants run by Allied Chemical Corp...
...At his office, Clayton Zerby plies his guests with facts and figures from an armful of bound notes...
...power reactors and to strengthen the U.S...
...The biggest commercial interest active in laser development is Exxon Oil Corp., which has tried and failed in the past to break the Government monopoly on enrichment facilities...
...A full 35 per cent of the Government's $150 billion a year business is composed of foreign clients...
...With uranium-238 as a supplemental fuel, the breeder would have many years' fuel supply in the leftover product of more than thirty years' enrichment work...
...Just to hold its ground in the foreign market and meet projected domestic demand, the United States would have to expand its enrichment capacity to about 30 million SWUs by the turn of the century...
...In recent years, the growing world demand for enriched uranium reactor fuel and the growing cost of the gaseous diffusion process have led to a search by government and industry for alternative methods of production...
...Nuclear Regulatory Commission projects an increase in the domestic demand by 1993 to about 20 million SWUs...
...William England, counsel and vice president for corporate affairs of Exxon's subsidiary, Exxon Nuclear Corp., has downplayed the proliferation threat...
...A subsidiary, Goodyear Atomic Corp., operates the Piketon, Ohio, gaseous diffusion plant...
...Clayton Zerby's factory and two others like it in neighboring Ohio and Tennessee comprise the uranium enrichment industry of the United States...
...Bechtel President George P. Shultz, Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon Administration, warns of growing European development of enrichment technology, particularly in France...
...Their gargantuan appetite for energy has pumped new life into the region's once-faltering coal industry...
...chooses new technologies for uranium enrichment, the effects will be felt abroad as well...
...Union Carbide runs the Kentucky and Tennessee plants...
...Theoretically, the laser separation process can achieve high-yield separative work with a single pass of a high-energy beam...
...All taxpayers share the burden of these and other enrichment costs through the Federal Government's monopoly of the enrichment business...
...Gaseous diffusion is one of the most capital- and energy-intensive industrial processes in use today...
...The Department of Energy estimates a light-water reactor rated at 1,000 megawatts will, on the average, require about 100,000 SWUs of enrichment work to supply its fuel needs for a year...
...But in 1976 the Senate rejected the Ford proposal of a 40 per cent subsidy and an $8 billion insurance fund for UEA in the event the project failed...
...Sprawled a few miles southwest of the confluence of the Tennessee and Ohio rivers, the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant gives its nearby host city the unofficial title of uranium crossroads of the nation...
...enrichment capacity by the time it reaches full force, probably in 1989...
...Everyone knows they play a key role in the country's economic and military development...
...For every four cylinders of gas pumped into the plant, only one cylinder emerges...
...Most of the uranium that powers U.S...
...The Department has budgeted $13 million a year for Livermore, and $ 17 million for Los Alamos...
...But in two years the cost nearly doubled, and since 1976, it has risen 8 to 10 per cent per year...
...When the gaseous diffusion plants were built, coal was cheap and the environmental consequences of large coal-burning generators were little noted...
...President Carter's rejection of a crash program to develop the breeder reactor, which could replace Uranium-235 fuel with plutonium and depleted uranium tails, plus steadily advancing development of high-volume enrichment technology in Europe, particularly in Britain and France, are heightening the pressure on the United States to expand its enrichment capacity and thus maintain its international market position...
...Piketon, and Paducah pumps out almost ten million pounds of reactor fuel each year, at cost, to electric utilities and reactor manufacturers...
...A $1.5 billion expansion and overhaul now underway at the aging gaseous diffusion plants is projected to increase production capacity to 27.3 million SWUs by 1981...
...But to the nuclear industry such close-cutting of demand with production capacity is dismaying because it leaves no room for significant expansion of the domestic or foreign market...
...Bechtel Corp...
...Soon, the Government must decide which laser method to settle on and whether that, too, will remain a Government monopoly because of the potential for the spread of bomb material and know-how...
...Together, the three plants account for a major portion of the electrical output of the entire Tennessee Valley Authority...
...The two main centers of Government laser research are at the Department of Energy's Livermore, California, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, nuclear weapons laboratories...
...But Bechtel's loss is still Goodyear's gain...
...Inside, the air is so hot you can feel it in your windpipe and the sound is so loud you can hear it through your earplugs...
...Once a cylinder of uranium gas belonging to a utility or reactor-maker is fed into one end of a diffusion plant system, it becomes part of the feed line and mixes with gaseous fuel owned by others...
...The street signs are there, the buildings come and go, and the place seems big enough to house a modest population with room to spare...
...But they are not alone...
...It is no secret in Paducah that Taylor G. Moore HI is a free-lance writer based in Louisville, Kentucky...
...The second ominous development, 'Critical choices must soon be made on a variety of nuclear technology issues' relating more directly to enrichment technology, has potential consequences equally as serious...
...Higher electricity costs from coal-fired plants add only about three cents per SWU...
...The U.S...
...Today, however, enormous governmental and private research programs are under way to find a wide variety of laser applications...
...But any similarities to a mayor's office — or any notions that this might be an ordinary factory — are quickly dispelled by a glance through the open door of a nearby walk-in vault...
...But the output of the present gaseous diffusion plants is committed through the year 2000 and much could happen over the next decade in the developing state of nuclear technology to reduce the cost of enriching uranium...
...He notes with alarm that the U.S...
...The plant gobbles up all of the 1,100 megawatts produced by TVA's nearby Shawnee Steam Plant and buys more from a coal-fired plant across the Ohio River in Illinois...
...The fateful choice in uranium enrichment Nuclear power's backstage battle Taylor G. Moore III Clayton D. Zerby, a round, friendly man, sounds like the mayor of a fair-sized town when, with a couple of public relations aides in tow, he takes you on a tour of his bailiwick on the outskirts of Paducah, Kentucky...
...The primary focus is on military uses, but isotopic separation methods also serve commercial purposes...
...The 750-acre Paducah plant cost $800 million to build in the early 1950s...
...First, building of the breeder reactor would lessen the need for more enriched uranium by substituting Plutonium as the base fuel...
...Its four football stadium-size process buildings, cooling towers, uranium cylinder storage yards, high-voltage transformer stages, and bulging overhead cables, secondary steam plants, and dozens of other buildings hum day and night with the flow of more than 1,800 million watts of electricity...
...It requires multi-million dollar plants the size of small towns, electricity in the thousands of megawatts from coal-fired generating plants, and millions of gallons of fresh water to cool the hot uranium gas...
...But when and where will such decisions be made...
...By their sheer volume of electrical consumption, the gaseous diffusion plants injected new life into a sluggish coal industry and attracted more energy-hungry industries to the Southeast...
...We do not believe the process is adaptable to small-scale, clandestine operations...
...The problem comes down to this: As the gaseous diffusion system grows more costly and obsolescent, the arrival of sophisticated new enrichment technologies is bringing a frightening new dimension to the nuclear power debate because of their potential for the spread of nuclear weapons...
...Built in World War II to provide enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, the Oak Ridge diffusion plant required construction by the Tennessee Valley Authority of what was then the world's largest coal-fired electric plant, producing 238,000 kilowatts of power...
...But it would be much more compact than a gaseous diffusion plant...
...The search, fueled by corporate and bureaucratic drives, is headed toward development of a new enrichment technology that threatens to spread bomb-grade nuclear materials...
...The importance of keeping nuclear weapons out of private hands has been the historical justification for the Government monopoly in uranium enrichment...
...Only a few pounds of highly enriched uranium-235 are needed for the making of a crude bomb...
...But the breeder reactor poses a host of unresolved problems, such as safeguarding of the deadly and militarily strategic plutonium, preventing of nuclear explosions in the reactors, and development of commercial reprocessing facilities to extract usable plutonium from spent fuel...
...The Department says that, with expansion also under way in the other two plants, this should be sufficient to meet U.S...
...light-water reactors, the design almost exclusively used for electric generation, is enriched at the three massive Government plants in the Ohio and Tennessee valleys...
...Bechtel, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and Williams Company, a pipeline and pump-maker, organized Uranium Enrichment Associates, to build a $3.5 billion gaseous diffusion plant and two power reactor units near Dothan, Alabama...
...For enrichment to the higher concentrations needed by today's power reactors, the uranium gas is shipped by rail and truck from Paducah to the diffusion plants at Oak Ridge and Piketon...
...Many are aware of the vast changes that uranium enrichment has brought to the lives of the people of Kentucky and Tennessee, but few recognize the further changes that may be in store for them and others as a result of unsettling developments now unfolding in this key sector of the troubled nuclear industry...
...This puts Kentucky in the middle of a nuclear fuel transportation network that is one of the busiest in the nation...
...The factory in Piketon, Ohio, uses more juice than the city of Cleveland...
...Of the total $13.80 per SWU increase, $9.10, or about 65 per cent, is attributed by the Department of Energy to a "significantly lower projection of enrichment services sales based on a March 1978 DOE projection of nuclear power growth...
...Last October, the day after President Carter kicked off his latest anti-inflation campaign, the Department of Energy announced a whopping 18 per cent increase, pushing the average cost of enrichment services for a typical commercial reactor from $7.5 million to $9 million a year...
...at Sequoyah, Oklahoma...
...Centrifugal separation, of which Britain also is a developer, requires about 96 per cent less electricity than gaseous diffusion, but it is just as capital-intensive...
...Heated and forced under tremendous pressure through the delicate filters of Paducah's 1,800 giant barrel-shaped process stages, the uranium hexafluoride is enriched to about 1.95 per cent U-235...
...This makes the laser method attractive to prospective producers of nuclear power or nuclear weapons...
...But Exxon is pushing for an early resolution of the issue...
...There is no sign of human activity in those long factory corridors except for the occasional passage of a faceless, yellow-suited figure on a speeding three-wheeled car, its red light flashing as it shrinks from sight...
...The campaign included heavy Congressional and Administration lobbying...
...The Paducah plant alone consumes one-third of all of the electricity in Kentucky...
...Billions of government and nuclear industry dollars are being spent on research to develop a commercially feasible method of uranium isotope separation by exposure to laser beams...
...Nickel is fashioned into layers of extreme fineness, then etched with acid to produce pores, more than a million per square inch, each less than a millionth of an inch in diameter...
...The multi-million dollar centrifuge plant under construction at Piketon is expected to add another 8.8 million SWUs to the annual U.S...
...The depleted uranium "tails," containing heavily 'enormous . .. programs are under way to find . . . laser applications' concentrated U-238, are used for the manufacture of hydrogen bomb casings or stockpiled as supplemental fuel for what the industry hopes will be the reactor of the future — the breeder reactor...
...Critical choices must soon be made on a variety of nuclear technology issues...
...The SWU is the unit of measurement for determining the cost of the end product...
...The "light bill" was $276 million last year...
...Government-sponsored research into highly efficient, more compact enrichment methods, such as laser isotope separation, has given rise to new fears about weapons proliferation...
...From the drawers of some of the filing cabinets hang red warning tags that read: "Classified...
...Industry pressure at first took the form of attempting to open up uranium enrichment to corporate ownership...
Vol. 43 • August 1979 • No. 8
