From the Washington Examiner:
Feds gave billions to energy firm with no business model
First of a three-part series
A chronically failing nuclear energy company using a technique one-twentieth as efficient as its competitors' has wrangled billions of dollars in cash, materials and research from the Department of Energy in deals that dwarf the Solyndra loan scandal.
The United States Enrichment Corp. has facilities in Kentucky and Ohio, home states of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, respectively.
The company has received support from those lawmakers, as well as from professed small-government stalwart Sen. Rand Paul, who also hails from Kentucky. All three men are Republicans, but USEC has also enjoyed backing from prominent Democrats, including President Obama.
USEC’s goal is to enrich uranium to produce fuel for nuclear power plants. But for the last 15 years, the company has relied on a World War II-era technique called gaseous diffusion.
Originally created as a federal agency, USEC was born in 1998 when President Clinton and the Republican-led 105th Congress privatized it in hopes that the new operation could spur technological innovations.
Instead, USEC executives got a $325 million “emergency supplemental” appropriation only three months after being after the privatization, and saw hefty raises.
Federal money kept USEC’s 1,000-employee Paducah, Ky., site operating long after it was clearly a losing proposition, bolstered by USEC promises that with a little more time and government money,it would bring modern technology to the market.
The Paducah site is owned by the Department of Energy, which allows its use by USEC free of charge. The site opened in 1952 and was taken over by USEC in 1998, selling its output to both the government and private-sector clients.
At its inception, the government gave USEC laser technology that government researchers spent $2 billion developing and which USEC was supposed to give the final push to market. USEC spent only $100 million trying to advance it before abandoning it in 1999.
The company then turned to a 1980s technology that the government had also spent billions developing and tried to modernize it. DOE gave the firm exclusive rights to the technology in exchange for $100 million, which will only have to be repaid if a new plant, known as the American Centrifuge Project, is actually built.
The ACP would consist of 96 arrays of large centrifuges that would enrich uranium to levels sufficient for use as nuclear reactor fuel without requiring the enormous amount of electricity that the Paducah plant did....MORE
