Boy, sometimes you think you know about something. You think you’ve got your finger on the pulse of what’s up. But you don’t.
I was very chagrined when yesterday I was relaxing in a fold-out chair during my daughter’s soccer practice, reading my latest issue of “Nuclear News”, and lo and behold I read that Urenco USA had started up their new uranium enrichment plant outside of Eunice, New Mexico!
I couldn’t believe it! I’ve been writing a multi-part series about isotope separation and uranium enrichment on this blog and I completely missed that for the first time in 50 years the United States has a new uranium enrichment plant! And to get even better, it employs a new advanced technology: the gas centrifuge, which promises vast efficiency improvements and far less power consumption than the previous way (gas diffusion) that we’ve done enrichment.
So let me say, congratulations to the Urenco USA team on their milestone and I wish them the best of success and they bring additional enrichment cascades online at their new enrichment plant!
Let me tell you another really cool thing about this new facility. About 30 miles away, west of Hobbs, New Mexico, another company called International Isotopes, Inc., is building their own fluorine recovery facility, where they will take the depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) that is the main byproduct of uranium enrichment and they will recover the fluorine. They’ll recover it as anhydrous hydrofluoric acid, which is exactly the stuff that you need to convert uranium oxide ore to uranium hexafluoride in the first place. That means that between Urenco USA and International Isotopes, they’ll be following the classic dictum to “reduce, reuse, and recycle”.
They’ll reduce the accumulation of depleted uranium hexafluoride. They’ll reuse the fluorine that was used to convert uranium oxide to uranium hexafluoride in the first place. And they’ll recycle the fluorine into additional uses preparing more uranium for enrichment.
I think that’s really cool. I love it when people use uranium and fluorine together to make nuclear power. Hopefully one of these days we’ll get to do it much more directly and shave a few complicated steps off the nuclear fuel cycle!
While we’re bring it up, you also missed the French enrichment plant starting up in December. It has its own “waste not” story: it reduces energy consumption by a factor of 50x relative to its predecessor (gas diffusion!), freeing up some 3 gigawatts of clean nuclear electricity for other purposes.
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/12/french-enrichment-plant-reduces-energy.html
Obviously, Urenco and the French are pretty confident that nuclear power is here to stay when they committed large investment in new enrichment plants.
To me this looks like another nail in the coffin of anti nuclear fanatics.
Wow 3 gigawatts! You could make a round trip through time in a properly modified DeLorean with that kind of power.
The centrifuge technology is old hat. Urenco has been using it commercially for 30 years as have the Russians. What IS new is the laser seperation technology devised by Silex and now being commecialized in North Carolina by GE and partners.
The deflorination technology being deployed in Texas has a BIG downside. Partly depleted uranium (.3% U235 in place of the the natural .7%)is a valuable resource. If the cost of U rises relative to SWU then the depleted uranium can be re-enriched to extract another 20% more reactor fuel than was generated in the initial enrichment.(If the new tails have a .2% U235 content)
Beside in a LFTR world what use enrichment?