http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/business...

Loan Request by Uranium-Enrichment Firm Upends Politics as Usual
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: November 24, 2011

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But the company, based in Bethesda, Md., points out that it provides nuclear fuel to one reactor for which foreign fuel or fuel from a foreign-owned company cannot substitute, because of rules against nuclear weapons proliferation.

That reactor, a civilian one owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, is used by the Energy Department to make tritium, a perishable material for nuclear bombs. (Submarine and aircraft carrier reactors can use highly enriched uranium from old inventories, some of it left over from decommissioned weapons.)

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John R. Longenecker, a consultant in the nuclear fuel business, said the problem for USEC was that there were too many other players in the market in a world awash in enrichment capacity. The industry had hoped for a renaissance that would result in many more reactors, he said, but “if that happened, I blinked and missed it.”

And there are large inventories of highly enriched uranium from decades of past production, much of it from decommissioned weapons. “We’ve got 100 years of high-enriched uranium in storage,” Mr. Longenecker said. With additional material coming out of uranium weapons, there is enough “probably for 1,000 years of whatever naval fuel we need.”