A federal judge seems to understand the fundamentals of uranium enrichment economics better than USEC, which filed for bankruptcy last week (Nuclear Newsreel, March 5). According to this article from Bloomberg, “U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Sontchi said today that USEC has no financial projections and falling sales because of an oversupply of enriched uranium, raising the question of why it would bother to reorganize its balance sheet in bankruptcy.
“What’s the point?” Sontchi asked D.J. Baker, a lawyer for USEC, at a hearing in Wilmington, Delaware. A reorganization might only “keep the company on life support for the next six to 10 years,” Sontchi said.”
USEC still wants to build a new $3 Billion uranium enrichment plant (mostly with a $2 Billion taxpayer loan it hopes to receive from DOE) despite declaring bankruptcy and having virtually no assets. Areva, which actually did receive a $2 Billion loan offer from DOE, scrapped plans to build a similar plant in Idaho because of the current global oversupply of enriched uranium and the failure of the “nuclear renaissance” in the U.S.
Note: GreenWorld will not publish tomorrow, Tuesday, March 11, 2014. Join the Fukushima anniversary-related action nearest you! We’ll be back on Wednesday.
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The necrophiliacs are still hovering around the rotting corpse of the nuclear industry. Vultures sail overhead. Their cash cow is gone and they cannot find other work. Don Richardson gaia@comporium.net