USEC Bailout Dies Yet Again

by Geoffrey Sea

also posted at Ecowatch

Setting some sort of record for the number of botched attempts to enact bad legislation, the U.S. Congress has now struck out a fourth time in as many months, failing to bail out the desperately dysfunctional uranium enrichment company, USEC Inc. USEC and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) issued fresh threats that the company would terminate its long-dying "American Centrifuge" uranium enrichment project, if not go belly up, without a new federal cash infusion by March 31. But the Senate and the House ignored those threats and left for two-week recess on March 29, after passing a 90-day Transportation holdover bill absent any USEC provision.

 

In reaction, USEC stock hit a low of $1.00 per share on the 29th, eight cents below its previous all-time low. That represents a loss of 96% of equity value from the high of nearly $24 per share reached in 2007, after USEC was awarded a construction and operating license for a centrifuge plant by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). NRC awarded the license for a commercial-scale plant near Piketon, Ohio, even though USEC had failed to even initiate a supposedly-mandatory testing program called the Lead Cascade, and even though USEC had no financing plan for building a commercial plant.

This week's developments demonstrate that an elaborate stock speculation swindle has been conducted, supported by DOE, NRC, and those members of Congress who took large amounts of campaign cash from USEC and then proposed federal payouts to the privatized company. Accusations of corruption involving USEC campaign contributions also emerged from congressional candidates this week, explaining the otherwise-mysterious retreat of the USEC caucus in Congress.

USEC's empty belly began to growl when the company was denied a $2 billion loan guarantee by the Department of Energy for a second time in October of 2011. Secretary of EnergySteven Chu then requested of Congress  two annual installments of $150 million each for an ill-defined and unjustified "Research, Development and Demonstration" program (RD&D), to accomplish the Lead Cascade viability test that USEC had failed to perform on its own, despite contractual obligations and thirteen years of heavy federal subsidy.

Chu Chews Train

But something was very strange about the Chu request, something revealing the RD&D project as a phantom, something glaringly obvious but not publicly discussed until now. In Chu's October 2011 letters to the Senate and the House, he requested funds for the construction of "one train of centrifuges (720 centrifuges)" and that number was never publicly altered or retracted.

However, in February of 2012, in writing off the costs of 38 centrifuges damaged in the 6-11-11 crashevent at Piketon, USEC placed the cost of the centrifuges at $120 million, or $3.16 million per centrifuge. At that price, 720 centrifuges would cost almost $2.3 billion, not including R&D, far more money than what was being requested of Congress by Chu.

After the tax write-off, USEC and DOE began discussing the proposed RD&D project as involving 120 centrifuges, not 720. Apparently, the 720 figure had been a misprint, but the misprint in an official funding request to Congress was never corrected, and Congress was left for the duration of the bailout effort believing that it could buy 720 centrifuges for an investment of only $300 million in federal money.

No fuss was made about the huge disparity in numbers, because the inside players understood that the RD&D program was an imaginary device from the get-go. In actuality, funds were being requested to pay USEC corporate expenses and keep the company out of bankruptcy court, where court-appointed accountants might reveal the full odoriferous history of under-the-table federal funding for USEC.

No "train of centrifuges" ever would materialize, for the very same reason that USEC never completed the Lead Cascade on its own. In the words of Piketon workers, the USEC forty-foot centrifuges based on forty-year-old technology are big "hunks'o'junk." There's nothing worth testing, if the machines could survive operational performance at all. The number of phantom centrifuges that Congress would be buying is therefore like the number of proverbial angels on the head of a pin. So Secretary of Energy Chu did not labor over the nonsensical number he included in his official request to Congress.

These kinds of smelly considerations certainly came into play when congressional leaders axed USEC bailoutmoney from the Omnibus appropriations bill passed in December. Strike 1.

Before Christmas, Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, representing the Ohio district that includes Piketon, submitted a stand-alone bill that would have permitted DOE to transfer $150 million to USEC in 2012 without specific congressional oversight or accounting controls. This was considered "too stupid" for committee consideration, in the words of a congressional staffer, so the planned January hearing on the measure was canceled without ceremony. Just as unceremoniously, Ms. Schmidt was then dumped by the voters in the Ohio Republican primary. Strike 2.

Kentucky congressman Ed Whitfield attempted a different kind of USEC bailout by mandating that DOE should "re-enrich" depleted uranium from government stockpiles at USEC's decrepit gaseous diffusion plant at Paducah, Kentucky. USEC itself put a stop to that one, declaring that extended operation of the plant is just too expensive, and so it intends toshut Paducah down. Announcement of the closure date as soon as this May is expected shortly. Strike 3.

USEC then should have been called out. But the two U.S. Senators from Ohio -- Rob Portman and Sherrod Wannabe-Portman Brown, both recipients of large amounts of campaign contributions from USEC and other Piketon contractors -- collaborated on a Schmidt-like USEC bailout amendment, snuck into the Senate Transportation bill that appeared to be headed to passage. But then House Republicans revolted as has become their fashion, opting instead for another 90-day extension, minus any USEC provision. That extension, which runs until July 1, is far too long to suit USEC, which has been operating on extended financing deadlines of its own since June 30, 2011.

Senator Sherrod Brown pitches corporate sponsor at Piketon

Chu's Alternative Universe

By July 1, there won't be enough of USEC left to bail out. The total market valuation of the company now is only $130 million, meaning that USEC could not afford its 50-50 cost-share for a proposed RD&D program for which the government kicks in $300 million. USEC has about $500 million in debt due to bondholders coming due in 2014, long before any new commercial plant could be completed. And USEC is operating at a loss, which has been running at an average of $135 million per quarter. By July 1, two more loss quarters in 2012 will have elapsed. At current valuation, USEC's net worth is less than half of the proposed federal bailout of $300 million. That doesn't cut mustard, much less atoms, in the Age of Solyndra where Tea Party rules apply.

Plus there are timing problems. In 2011, Chu proposed a two-year RD&D program, which on paper could have been completed before USEC goes to the hock shop in 2014. If the start of the RD&D program is now delayed, as it must be, until the third quarter of 2012, at the earliest, then there isn't enough time to complete the program, even in theory. That's assuming the proposed project were real, in some alternative universe within Steven Chu's brain.

And the Administration has requested $150 million for the second year of USEC RD&D in 2013, bizarrely taken, without explanation, from the "nuclear nonproliferation" budget. That request is premised on completion of the first year in 2012, which now cannot happen. Congress will be asked to consider funding the second year of a two-year program before the first year is funded.

Simply put, the PR logic of the RD&D program proposed slap-dash last October has defeated itself by virtue of the congressional delay. Republican Portman and his Democratic sidekick Brown could yet preempt their own amendment by introducing the measure as a stand-alone, or by trying yet another slip-in circumvention. The former strategy, however, would necessitate committee hearings, which would do to a USEC bailout what sunlight does to vampires. And further slushing around in the USEC stock swindle pits might do unsavory things to Brown's 2012 reelection campaign, ranked as one of the most competitive Senate contests this year. November is approaching and Schmidt's primary loss forewarns.

All of which is highlighted by the emergence of USEC corruption as a major issue in Tennessee's fourth congressional district race. Eric Stewart, the Democratic challenger,is charging that incumbent Republican Scott DesJarlais timed his support for a USEC bailout to a $1,000 contribution to DesJarlais from the USEC PAC, an example of crony capitalism at work, according to Stewart.

That's small potatoes compared to the suspicious timing of federally-subsidized USEC politicking in Ohio, where then-governor Ted Strickland had to return one USEC contribution (but kept many others) because that contribution was timed too closely to a 2010 meeting at which Strickland and Brown together lobbied Chu to circumvent Congress in giving funds to USEC. In early 2011, Sherrod Brown publicly called on the Department of Energy to forgo further testing of USEC centrifuges and simply award the company a $2 billion loan guarantee. Up to the third quarter of 2011, according to FEC records, Brown received $58,500 from USEC and related corporate PACs including USEC nuclear utility customers and Piketon site contractors.

Republican Rob Portman may also find some aspirations dashed upon the USEC shoals. He has been considered a top contender for Romney’s running-mate. But Portman is nearing the two-decade mark as a USEC shill, and continued allegiance to the Enron of 2012 might see more vocal protest from the slap-happy anti-Solyndra GOP base.

Therefore, we may not see more clandestine Portman-Brown maneuvers. They say that USEC and its "American Centrifuge Plant" have nine lives. Excuse the mixed metaphor, but now it's the bottom of the tenth, USEC is down, and even the fans are weary of the game.



UPDATE: Simultaneous to this post, USEC issued a statement in advance of its March 31 deadline

The key line is: "USEC continues to pursue both legislative and non-legislative paths to the federal cost share of the funding for the RD&D program for the balance of government FY2012."

In other words, if Congress says no to USEC, USEC will circumvent Congress and use its political influence to get the money from DOE directly without an appropriation. Which is, of course, unconstitutional.

But USEC considers itself above the law and the Constitution.

USEC told Politico that its commitment to the RD&D would hold through May.

Paducah Closure Throws Nuclear Policy into Chaos

by Geoffrey Sea

Also posted at: Ecowatch

Environmentalists should be jubilant as the dinosaurian uranium enrichment plant at Paducah, Kentucky, nears expiration as soon as May. Based on antiquated gaseous diffusion technology, the facility is the largest single-meter power consumer on the planet, eating as much electricity as the city of St. Louis. It is likely the largest point-source emitter of the worst ozone-depleting greenhouse gasses in the world, chlorofluorocarbons, as well. Paducah has a notorious history as a generator of occupational illness, since worker-whistleblower Joe Harding compiled lists of cancer-stricken co-workers:

It should have been shut down long ago. Yet no government agencies or environmental groups are clamoring for closure, because the event will generate as many problems as it solves.

The shutdown has been foreseeable and even scheduled for many years. Privatization of the United States Enrichment Corporation (now USEC Inc.) in the 1990s aimed at closing Paducah and its sister plant near Piketon, Ohio, with plausible deniability for incumbent politicians. (The pols could huff and puff about the loss of jobs, while throwing up their hands at USEC's unchallengeable "business decisions.") But now, with cessation of production imminent in the run-up to a presidential election, the dark clouds of the most precipitous failure of privatization in U.S. history are gathering into a perfect storm of policy breakdown.

The Paducah plant's closure will end all USEC production of nuclear fuel, effectively terminating the company for its established purposes, undoing years of taxpayer-subsidized PR hawking USEC as the sole domestically-owned enrichment company. (USEC may continue as what the CEO calls "a smaller company," devoted to the importation of Russian uranium and peripheral businesses.)

Neither USEC nor the Department of Energy (DOE) have the funds to keep the plant open, nor have the parties cooperated on a plan to pay for the expensive process of shutting it down, redirecting the workforce, or cleaning up the radiotoxic mess. Decades of lax or unregulated dumping and maintenance neglect have left an industrial witch's brew of asbestos, PCBs, TCE, fluorides, beryllium, nickel carbonyl, plutonium, and classified materials unknown or unrevealed.

The Piketon enrichment plant closed in May of 2001, on the theory that staggered cleanup of the grossly abused sites, which remain government-owned, would be more affordable. But for all eight years of G.W. Bush's tenure at the White House, Piketon cleanup was postponed, while USEC was paid exorbitant fees, a hidden form of subsidy, to maintain Piketon in mothball status. The expensive part of Piketon decontamination and decommissioning (D&D), involving tear-down of process buildings that cover almost a hundred acres and disposal of millions of cubic yards of waste has yet to begin. But now there isn't the money to pay for that either.

D&D-Day

For decades of U.S. monopoly on the western world's supply of commercial enriched uranium, nuclear utility companies were charged a surtax on uranium fuel supplied from the gaseous diffusion plants to pay for ultimate D&D of the facilities. But with privatization and the rise of new generations of cheap centrifuge enrichment technology abroad, along with pressure from the utilities, the surtax was waived in yet another subsidy for USEC, to keep the company's product cost-competitive.

That was engineered principally by USEC's captive Ohio congressman, who became the Bush Administration's Trade Representative and Budget Director, now U.S. Senator, Rob Portman. The future of the Piketon and Paducah sites for literally thousands of years to come was mortgaged to pay for a perceived transient business boost to USEC Inc. in the decade following 1998.

Make a mental note, because when Portman runs for POTUS at the end of his Senate term in 2016, the USEC catastrophe will be the most radioactive skeleton in his closet.

As a result of Portman's concessions to USEC, the D&D Fund languished with inadequate and non-accumulating balances, and now it has been all but shelved as a bipartisan embarrassment. In 2004, the Government AccountabilityOffice warned that the fund is "insufficient to cover cleanup costs,"  but that warning was so dire and so implicitly condemnatory of rising stars in both of the major political parties (i.e. Mitch McConnell, Mr. Portman and the latter's south Ohio bedfellow rival Ted Strickland, not to mention the Clinton and Bush clans), the consensus action was to bury the report's conclusions.

Supposedly -- no updated accounting is available -- the fund has stood at about $4.4 billion. But in 1996,the National Academy of Sciences cited variousestimates for the total costs of gaseous diffusion cleanup ranging from $8 billion to $46 billion, meaning that the D&D Fund, which has also been diverted to non-decommissioning activities, cannot now even pay for inflation adjustments on the bill.

Steps taken by the ensuing Obama Administration to rectify the situation and prepare for the inevitable D&D operations remain undisclosed as if classified for national security. The Department of Energy has been wracked by paralysis born of the seriousness and magnitude of the problems, and internal divisions caused by top deputy and assistant secretary positions left in the hands of Bush Administration holdovers, whose agenda has been to sabotage the current Administration. Add wildly irrational antagonism from Republicans in Congress, including especially from the top two Republicans, Ohio's John Boehner and Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, who have made the inherent competition for funds between Piketon and Paducah into a kickball between the chambers of Congress, providing total assurance that nothing legislative can get done.

Until recently (too late to make a difference) all three officials at DOE with lead responsibility for the Piketon and Paducah sites were holdover Republicans: Deputy Secretary Daniel Poneman, a transfer from the neocon Scowcroft Group, whose chief prior portfolio in and outside of government had beenunsuccessful attempts to persuade Australians and Mongolians toaccept high-level nuclear waste from the United States for disposal; Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management (resigned last July amidst suspicions of misconduct) Ines Triay, who invented theillegal method of bartering uranium with USEC to fund cleanup operations; and Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy (replaced in 2011) Dennis Spurgeon, the former Chief Operating Officer for USEC.

The revolving door at the Department of Energy's Forrestal Building in Washington spins a whole lot more reliably than USEC uranium centrifuges.

With Triay and Spurgeon gone, the non-saboteurs at the Department of Energy had only ten months to come up with tens of billions of dollars in legal funds for cleanups at Piketon and Paducah, over the contradictory objections of congressional leaders, in an election year of Tea Party austerity.

Duck and Cover

Meanwhile, McConnell and the rest of the powerful Kentucky delegation launched a political offensive, insisting that DOE find a way to keep the Paducah environmental monstrosity open as a jobs program, although those temporarily-saved jobs would come at an exorbitant expense to U.S. taxpayers, and undo every vestigial benefit of privatization. (For the savings of closure, the government could hire many times the number of workers to sit and "watch waste," as one Piketon employee has described his second career.) Senator McConnell even crossed territorial lines to verbally assault Secretary of Energy Steven Chu at a hearing in the House of Representatives.

In response, Chu and his subordinates followed the "Duck and Cover" guidance of their atomic agency predecessors:

And never has ducking and covering been done with more ardor and non-aplomb than by Chu's DOE. No less than three groups of Senators and Representatives from both parties barraged Chu with interrogatory letters in early 2012, seeking answers to basic questions about continuing stated DOE support for USEC Inc.'s fantasy-land centrifuge spin-doctoring, matched with a non-compos-mentis (not mentally competent) policy regarding real-world cleanup matters at Paducah and Piketon. Not one of the congressional inquiries has yet drawn a written response. Nobel-winner Chu is going for the gold now in Olympic ball-dropping.

The Kentucky delegation has pushed a proposal originally advocated by USEC called "re-enrichment," which would involve a sweetheart no-bid contract for USEC to run some depleted uranium "tails," now stored in thousands of cylinders at the Paducah and Piketon sites, back through the Paducah enrichment cascade, squeezing out some additional Uranium-235, staving off a total shutdown.

But all at once, this would violate the laws of economics, jurisprudence, and thermodynamics. It could never be more profitable to "re-enrich" tails than it would be to enrich new natural uranium, and the latter course would employ now-underemployed uranium miners, if the objective were to save jobs. If tails were re-enriched, it would never make sense to employ the least-efficient technology on earth, rather than to send the tails to a super-efficient centrifuge plant like the one operating in New Mexico, if the objective were to make money to fund site cleanup. Current legal agreements aimed at protecting the uranium mining industry limit the amount of government uranium stockpiles that can be released in any year to ten percent of the domestic market for commercial uranium.

But that allowance is already at quota, owing to the Triay caper of using uranium barters to funnel extra-legal funds to USEC for various and nefarious purposes beyond congressional scrutiny. Plus, any such legislated market intervention would explicitly contradict the USEC Privatization Act, the rationale for which, after all, was to shut Paducah down with hands-off by the politicians.

One can almost sympathize, however, with Mitch McConnell in this spring 2011 exchange with Steven Chu at a Senate Appropriations hearing:

Aside from the disingenuous posturing about the decrepit Paducah plant and the desperate re-enrichment proposal, McConnell makes a simple point:

"Let's assume we don't do that [re-enrichment], then the question is, do we have the funds in the 2012 budget to safely and securely idle the [Paducah] plant after it closes and returns to the government?...There's apparently no plan in your budget for cleanups after the operations cease."

Chu then evades the cleanup issue entirely. A bit later in the transcript:

Chu: We would have an obligation to clean up that plant
McConnell: When will we see the plan?

Chu: Well, um, we can get back to you and your staff on that.
McConnell: ...What I think I hear you saying is, you've got no plans for either contingency at the moment.

Chu never got back to McConnell or any other legislator on funding for Paducah cleanup.

The Wreck of the USS USEC

Ten months later, additional uranium transfers have been made to USEC for no purpose other than to keep the company out of bankruptcy, and with closure of Paducah only sixty days away, still no shutdown management or site cleanup plans have been disclosed by DOE. Worse, cleanup funding for the Piketon site has been slashed in the President's 2013 budget proposal, and it's become clear that DOE lacks the funds for legally-compliant cleanup of even one of the gaseous diffusion sites, much less two at one time.

The Senate exchange between Chu and McConnell does reveal what has happened. Asked about cleanup, Chu can't even train his scientific mind on the subject. Instead, he digresses to off-topic technobabble about a project he doesn't quite want to specify, intended to replace gaseous diffusion. That is a feint to USEC's own corporate PR, which, since the company's creation, justified all manner of end-runs around constitutional and statutory law for the sake of a yet-unfulfilled promise that USEC would develop an "advanced" enrichment technology, and deploy it in such a way as to replace the aged plants at Piketon and Paducah.

That proprietary pitch never worked out well for the impoverished communities of Piketon and Paducah, which were pitted against one another in USEC-incited competition. An "advanced" plant would employ relatively few people -- a few hundred as opposed to a few thousand -- leaving the jobs problem unaddressed. The national security dimensions of a new enrichment plant would prohibit any other form of more gainful reindustrialization at the selected site. And a new plant would not magically clean up the legacy contamination, though it might allow DOE to escape high costs by lower contamination standards through the rubric of "nuclear reuse."

And that's exactly how USEC sold its "American Centrifuge" charade to DOE budget bureaucrats. For more than a decade, DOE has funneled federal dollars to "privatized" USEC by the billions, on the ever-extended promise that by building some new kind of nuclear facility at either Piketon or Paducah or both, the major nuclear cleanup costs would be avoided, even if the political promise of saved jobs were as phony as the spin on a USEC centrifuge.

Which turned out to be pretty phony, indeed. On June 11, 2011, only weeks after Steven Chu's Senate dissembling about how a new enrichment technology might answer the cleanup question, six USEC centrifuges crashed in a covered-upaccident at the Piketon test facility, where, after a decade of alleged development, USEC had managed to get only thirty-eight centrifuges running. The June 11 debacle led to a second denial of a federal loan guarantee to USEC, now under Solyndra-like scrutiny, which in turn left USEC barely able to stay out of bankruptcy court, much less build a new nuclear facility, as the company entered the cataclysmic year of 2012.

Half a Billion with a B

In its annual report filed March 14,2012, USEC acknowledges a net loss for 2011 of $540.7 million. That's half a billion dollars, including a $127 million write-off for all of the operable centrifuges it had produced so far, a fair chunk of change. Virtually all of those lost moneys came from accrued federal subsidies, including a $50 million mystery payment to USEC from DOE in the third quarter of 2011.

Moreover, the Obama Administration has proposed giving USEC an additional $300 million over the next two years for an alleged "Research, Development & Demonstration" centrifuge project -- the same crashed program that USEC was contractually bound to complete with private financing by 2005 but never did. Congress has so far not consented to that appropriation, as the request lacks any hint of transparency or accounting controls.

Circumventing committee debate on the issue, Ohio's two Senators, Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman, inserted a provision for the funding as a last-minute amendment to the unrelated Transportation bill passed by the Senate, but in a rather stunning display of corporate-shill cynicism, Portman voted against the bill that contained his own USEC amendment.

The House has delayed action on the Transportation bill to at least mid-April and more likely to the ninety-day limit of a continuing bill introduced on March 22, which itself contains no bailout language for USEC. That means Congress will almost certainly miss the March 31 "deadline" set by both USEC and DOE as the last date by which the "American Centrifuge" project could be saved from termination by congressional action. USEC had less than $38 million in cash at the end of 2011, per its annual report.

USEC's bailout prospects have been further damaged by the sound defeat of incumbent congresswoman JeanSchmidt, whose district includes Piketon, in the Republican primary election on Super Tuesday. Schmidt sits on the Transportation Committee, and the T-bill strategy for accomplishing a USEC bailout had been premised on her influence.

Republicans in the congressional delegation from Kentucky may be a bailout's biggest opponents, since they are being asked to support a new unexplained payment to USEC that is cockamamie, as they may or may not say in Kentucky, just a month before the Paducah plant is scheduled for shutdown, with no management or cleanup plan revealed. That's a lot to swallow for a state that's shown no particular love for federal lawmaking.

Kentucky lawmakers are so exasperated, they have fallen back on demanding the re-enrichment scheme just to avert a catastrophic closure with no advance preparations whatsoever. But USEC has put the kibosh on that kind of talk, since the company is in no kind of shape to keep Paducah operating at a loss.

Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant

In a webcast conference call that attended release of its annual report, USEC managers emphasized that of three conditions all needed to extend operations at Paducah, none have been met, none are likely to be met by May, and one -- sufficient market demand for low-enriched uranium -- is virtually impossible given post-Fukushima conditions. Mandatory six-month plant closure notices were issued to Paducah employees last November.

In a concurrent filing with the SEC, USEC made plain:

"...we do not believe there is sufficient uncommitted demand for LEU [Low-Enriched Uranium] to support a Paducah extension, even with an agreement with DOE for tails re-enrichment to absorb a significant portion of the plant production capacity. Therefore, at some point in the next 18 months, we expect to cease commercial enrichment at the Paducah GDP [Gaseous Diffusion Plant] but the facility may remain operational to meet other requirements."

"Operational" means that USEC will continue non-enrichment activities at the site, to prevent its being replaced by some other managerial contractor. According to Weapons Complex Monitor, USEC has also expressed interest in obtaining the multibillion-dollar D&D contract for Paducah. But when USEC attempted to secure the equivalent contract at Piketon, it was barred from bidding by a conflict-of-interest ruling from the DOE General Counsel. There is no reason to think that the ruling would not apply equally to Paducah.

The Writing on the Wall

The Paducah plant will close in May or soon thereafter, reverting to U.S. government control through a process called deleasing (similar in all ways to delousing). USEC simply can't afford to keep Paducah open. Following pure profit motive, as it is supposed to do by virtue of the Privatization Act, USEC has calculated that the company loses money every day that Paducah remains in operation, whereas, precisely because DOE has not prepared any contingency plan for D-Day (deleasing day), DOE will be forced to retain USEC as a managerial agent for the shuttered facility. Just as it did at Piketon for a decade, USEC can then collect cushy contract fees, producing nothing, free of any risk or marketplace rough and tumble.

Exit from the internationally-competitive and shrinking (outside of China and India) uranium enrichment industry, and entry into the world of big-time contract services for the U.S. government and other companies, is exactly the corporate strategy that USEC has pursued for the last eight years, since 2004. In that year, USEC purchased NAC International, a company that provides transportation and storage services for spent nuclear fuel, on contract.

So while the Department of Energy has been hawking and funding USEC's centrifuge technology as the best thing since sliced atoms, USEC has been plotting its exit from the enrichment industry altogether, which partially accounts for why its "American Centrifuge" shadow play has been such a non-starter. There is no "American Centrifuge Plant," as the signs on the highway advertise. It's an American subterfuge project, nothing but a high-tech siphon for emptying the U.S. Treasury.

Has Chu's Department of Energy been fooled by this? I don't think so. DOE has rationally concluded that as long as it can maintain the pretense of a coming "advanced" enrichment facility, it can avoid billions of dollars in otherwise mandatory cleanup costs, by setting aside all or portions of the Piketon site for "future nuclear use," with attendant lower cleanup standards.

And that's what we've seen at Piketon -- a succession of hoax promised nuclear projects (spent fuel storage, nuclear reprocessing, nuclear reactors, and what not) -- together with accelerated "cleanup" schedules to sweep up the site on the cheap, before the future nuclear uses are revealed as phantoms. The latest announced schedule for Piketon D&D, premised on USEC running a completed centrifuge plant on a portion of the site, calls for conclusion of an on-site waste disposal decision, opposed by an overwhelming majority of the community, before this fall, coincidentally enough.

DOE appears to have calculated that it's cheaper to keep paying USEC in $50 million under-the-table installments -- to save the company from bankruptcy court and to keep up the appearance that the "American Centrifuge" project is ongoing -- rather than publicly acknowledge that DOE is on the hook legally for tens of billions of dollars of post-nuclear cleanup costs at both the Piketon and Paducah sites, with not even the prospect of funding to pay for it. That logic holds at least until the November election. After that, atomic bombs might as well drop.

But both Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are on to that caper. They know there will be no deus ex machina to prevent a catastrophic closure of the Paducah plant, or a final curtain draw on the "American Centrifuge" stage act, all before Barack Obama stands before the voters in November. The Republicans are planning one helluva summer and fall offensive in the heartland Ohio Valley.

And that is why Steven Chu, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, in continuing to shovel federal funds to USEC Inc., while simultaneously playing possum on cleanup of the Piketon and Paducah sites, may turn out to be the highest-ranking idiot savant of all time.

Mystery Candidate Revealed; Federal Inquiry Opened

by Geoffrey Sea

WLWT Television in Cincinnati has succeeded in getting a first interview with what they continue to call the "mystery candidate" who may have won the Democratic primary in Ohio's second district. (See prior blog post.)

Filling in the blank slate of Bill Smith's policy positions, he boldly supports lower fuel prices (he's a long-haul trucker), and questions President Obama's actions regarding the ouster of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Smith appears totally ignorant of the factors that led to his suprise victory, referring to the mystery robocalls that were made on his behalf as "a phone bank." He admits to having felt that he should withdraw from the race.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party of Hamilton County, which includes the city of Cincinnati, issued a press release backing the call for an investigation of the robocalls by the U.S. Department of Justice, tagging the potential crime as a consequence of the Citizens United decision:

Without real and meaningful transparency, shadowy groups from almost anywhere could influence our elections and we might never know it happened. This should be regarded as an intolerable situation.

Caleb Faux, executive director of the DPHC, appears in the WLWT segment as saying that he has never met and knows nothing about Mr. Smith, the presumptive nominee of the party.

USA Today reports that the U.S. Attorney's office for southern Ohio HAS launched an inquiry into the matter, which will be coordinated with the FBI and FEC. That has been confirmed by Matt Sledge, writing in an article on Huffington Post, which graciously links to this blog as providing a lead theory for explaining the robocalls.

And in an unrelated case (I should say "so far unrelated"), Ohio State Representative W. Carlton Weddington, Democrat of Columbus, has resigned and surrendered, and been indicted and jailed (order unclear) after an FBI sting operation caught him offering to introduce legislation on behalf of a false-front business that lavished him with trips and other gifts. According to the Columbus Dispatch:

Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien said he believes the felony bribery charge handed down against state Rep. W. Carlton Weddington, of Columbus, is the first of its kind against a state lawmaker since 1912.

The legacy of such corruption in Ohio is clear. One can trace it at least as far back as Ohio Governor Robert Lucas, who chaired the first Democratic Party National Convention in 1832. Lucas, after whom the Lucas County of Toledo is named, secured his election as governor through the popular act of ordering the Ohio Militia to break him out of a local jail, where he had been confined on charges of paternity with failure to provide child support. (Only men could vote at the time.)  Lucas, who founded Ohio's Democratic Party machine, came -- almost redundant to say it -- from Pike County.

Selling legislation in exchange for cash or gifts?  As Lucas would say, it's not a privelege of public office. In Ohio, it's a right.

On the same day as Weddington's arrest, U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman successfully attached an amendment to the Senate version of the massive Transportation bill, which would authorize the Department of Energy to transfer $150 million to USEC Inc., just to keep the company afloat.  The amendment faces stiff opposition as an unlawful earmark in the House, though Congresswoman Schmidt, now a lame duck, sits on the Transportation Committee.

Among current office holders, Sherrod Brown is the largest recipient of USEC PAC campaign contributions, though Portman is gaining on him. Just sayin'.

UPDATE: The Krikorian campaign has issued a statement expressing optimism about the counting of an estimated 500 provisional and overseas absentee ballots to take place next week:

The reason for our optimism is that a majority of the district-wide provisional ballots to be counted are from Hamilton and Clermont counties where our vote was stronger. We also believe the remaining absentee ballots including military and oversees ballots would likely not be affected by the mysterious "Victory Ohio Super Pac", now under FBI investigation, which designed, produced and distributed two sophisticated automated telephone messages confusing some voters into supporting my opponent. The calls placed to Democratic primary voters began 4 days before the election and they had a definite and deliberate impact on the outcome.

Failing Nuclear Project at Center of Ohio Primary Shockers

by Geoffrey Sea


Results of the March 6 primary election in Ohio's sleepy second congressional district have generated explosive national headlines, on both the Republican and Democratic sides. In the most humiliating election loss by an incumbent so far this cycle, congresswoman Jean Schmidt (R-OH) was defeated by six percentage points in a five-way contest for the GOP nomination.

And her long-time nemesis in politics and in the courtroom, David Krikorian, also may have lost his bid for the Democratic nomination, by 59 votes in the unofficial count. A self-styled Super PAC sponsored robocalls just before election day, boosting a politically-unknown Krikorian opponent named Bill Smith of Waverly in Pike County. (About five hundred absentee and provisional Democratic ballots remain uncounted, so the final outcome on that side remains uncertain.)

The robocall entity calling itself "Victory Ohio Super PAC" is not registered either with the Federal Election Commission or the State of Ohio, and it engaged in no known activity beyond the OH-02 congressional race. The originating Cleveland mobile phone number of the robocalls, which inverted reality by implying that Smith, not Krikorian, was endorsed by the Democratic Party, is no longer in service. Tim Burke and Dave Lane, who chair the Democratic Party committees in the district's two largest counties, Hamilton and Clermont -- committees that had endorsed Krikorian after hearing not a word from Mr. Smith -- are reportedly hopping mad.

On March 9, Gregory Korte and an associate at USA Today published an expose of the "MysterySuper PAC," and the mystery Mr. Smith, a story carried front-page in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Only a day earlier, Mr. Korte published the results of a USA Today investigation into hypocritical attempts by Republican congressmen, led by Jean Schmidt, to accelerate the award of a $2 billion federal loan guarantee to USEC Inc. for its non-starter uranium enrichment project in the OH-02 district. The very same congressmen have been simultaneously attacking the Department of Energy (DOE) for its loan guarantee to Solyndra.

Korte did not connect his back-to-back stories, but indeed they are connected. That the two biggest shockers of the ten-state Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses emerged out of a single congressional race should be no surprise, since that race is seen as determining the fate of a $5 billion phantom nuclear project at the eastern end of the second district, at a government-owned site near Piketon.

William "Butch" Smith, presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. Congress

(no authentic photograph has yet surfaced)

Schmidt-Canned

Ms. Schmidt has been USEC's most loyal agent in Congress and one of the largest recipients of USEC campaign cash. In the wake of two successive denials of a loan guarantee by DOE and in time for last Christmas, Schmidt introduced a now-defunct bill to bail out USEC with taxpayer dollars. USEC's future survival as a company, by its own account, depends on pending government bailout efforts, which in turn may have depended on Jean Schmidt's reelection.

On the other hand, Mr. Krikorian, who was widely expected to defeat Schmidt in November had she survived her primary, became the most vocal Ohio politician to question the wisdom of further corporate welfare for USEC, a company allegedly privatized in 1998. In September of 2011, before declaring his 2012 candidacy, Krikorian on his personal blog attacked federal support for USEC as a false jobs promise, "political hope-ium."

In 2012, Krikorian's position has prevailed in Congress, as members from both parties have joined to deny USEC any needed bailout package.

Now a "ward of the state," as the nuclear trade publication Fuel Cycle Week puts it, USEC has withheld disclosure of its 2011 fourth quarter earnings and annual report, pending results of the March 6 primary. As the company must weigh bankruptcy options, politicians and investors expect a long-planned May 2012 closure of USEC's remaining uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky, and termination of its centrifuge project in Ohio. 

"The American Centrifuge Plant" or ACP was resurrected from an even older government project in 2001, but eleven years later there is virtually nothing to show for the endeavor, except for a stockpile of wasted federal expenditures, about three dozen large centrifuges referred to by workers as "hunks'o'junk" or "cans'o'spam," and private debts that many fear will wind up being born by U.S. taxpayers.

In recent weeks and days, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has held successive meetings with members of the Ohio and Kentucky congressional delegations, now fighting over scraps of potential federal assistance. That the two most powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, hail respectively from Ohio and Kentucky, adds fun and hijinks.

Boehner wanted the USEC earmarks-not-called-earmarks targeted on Ohio, at least on paper, so that neighbor Schmidt could defend her congressional seat against Krikorian. McConnell wanted the same funding diverted to life-extension for the Paducah plant. Thus, national policy and budget allocation decisions depended on the seven-candidate cluster-muck of the OH-02 primary, which has now thrown nuclear futures into glorious disarray.

Adding to the fandango, I write on the first anniversary of USEC's radical turn for the Schmidt-can. The company provided the uranium fuel that began to melt down inside three nuclear reactors at Fukushima following the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Not only did that put a damper on happy-talk about USEC, but it deprived USEC of its most reliable market for nuclear fuel. Japanese utilities accounted for between ten and twenty percent of USEC's customer base, and USEC had the misfortune of citing TEPCO -- operator of the Fukushima reactors -- as the lead future customer for uranium to be enriched at Piketon.

Though all seven primary candidates in the OH-02 congressional race resisted touching the USEC hot potato on the stump, all were aware that the low-budget congressional race was penny-ante compared to the many billions of dollars at stake in USEC's fast or slow-motion collapse.

The Obama Administration has continued to indulge USEC, offering the nonsensical promise of a new "Research, Development, and Demonstration" project in the President's 2013 budget proposal, raw meat thrown to the fighting lions of the Boehner-McConnell arena. This is generally understood as another kick-the-can operation, on the premise that a USEC bankruptcy filing, with a suped-up layoff announcement in depressed southern Ohio, can be postponed until after November.

Adding Tom Clancy intrigue and conspiracy-theory potential, federal support and administration of the centrifuge project come not from DOE civilian programs but from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a clandestine group in charge of tracking and controlling rogue nuclear weapons. Some federal payments to USEC have been "black budget," and the Administration's proposed new USEC dole would involve transfer of funds from NNSA's other activities to USEC, a transfer that has come under fire from members of Congress and NGOs.

Piketon site contractors have been notorious for meddling in area politics; the current mayor of Piketon gets the greater portion of his income by working as a USEC security guard, for example. In 2006, area Democrats and Republicans were rounded up by contractors to support spent nuclear fuel storage at the Piketon site. In 2009, USEC hosted a shindig at Piketon to announce a "coming nuclear reactor," which turned out to be little more than a 2010 reelection platform for Governor Ted Strickland, a Democrat, and Republican congresswoman Schmidt. USEC was the fifth largest PAC contributor to Jean Schmidt's 2012 congressional campaign.

Jean Schmidt's haunt on the Ohio River

(no offense intended to witches or Greens)

Therefore, it came as little real surprise that two phantom candidates from Pike County entered the 2012 congressional contest in OH-02, one Republican and one Democrat, even though Pike County, with a total population of about 28,000, represents only about 3% of the district's voter base.

The Republican, Joe Green, claimed to be a resident of Piketon and the CEO of an unnamed "successful technical consulting company" for which no website or public record seems to exist. His centerpiece program for bringing more "technical and professional" jobs to the impoverished region appeared to be nothing but a plug for USEC's centrifuge project. Announced in the fall with electronic hoopla, his campaign vanished once it became clear that Schmidt would vigorously defend her seat.

Then came Mr. Smith, referred to in almost all of the newspaper coverage as "the mystery candidate," including even his hometown newspaper, the Pike County News Watchman, which, in the March 11 edition, calls him "a virtual unknown in the political realm." Smith made no campaign appearances and did nothing to identify himself to voters, but nonetheless managed to achieve stratospheric levels of name recognition, even though practically nobody knows the man -- his work as a long-distance trucker leaves him very little time to socialize in Ohio. The News Watchman couldn't track him down for a statement until after his apparent victory in the primary. The statement was: "I haven't even been home since the primary election...I honestly thought some of my friends were messing with me."

Asked about his policy positions, none of which were stated during his non-campaign, Smith told the paper: "I'm not much of a politician, but we'll see what happens." If this Mr. Smith goes to Washington, don't expect a Jimmy Stewart moment. According to the News Watchman, "Smith said he really has no idea how he won, and called his victory 'a miracle.'"

Miracles have some history in Pike County, related like everything else to the federal site south of Piketon. In the 1970s, politicians and developers hawked a project called "Miracle City" to be built on the edge of the "atomic reservation," as a commercial/residential spinoff, utilizing waste heat from the old uranium enrichment plant. Now, as the local joke goes, the miracle is that the whole city is invisible!

Let's return to the miracle of the mystery candidate after paying homage to the passing of Ms. Schmidt from the American political landscape.

Enough of this Schmidt

With all precincts reporting, Jean Schmidt took less than 43% of the GOP primary vote, to 49% for Brad Wenstrup, a medical doctor and Iraq War veteran who has never held elective office. Wenstrup is expected to win the general election handily, regardless of his Democratic opponent.

Schmidt's departure from Congress will remove a landmark of imbecility and shamefulness. After the OH-02 congressional district had been gerrymandered to include the Piketon site for its pork production capabilities, Schmidt inherited the congressional seat from Rob Portman in 2005, as he began his ascent to environmental insult stardom. Schmidt's debut on the floor of the House, dressed in a Captain America suit, was to attack ex-Marine congressman Jack Murtha as a "coward." She did display real courage in backing a constitutional amendment against flag desecration, since the measure as proposed might have landed her in jail as a felon, just for her wardrobe.

In 2006, Schmidt set a record of sorts by becoming the first House member in U.S. history to invite high-level nuclear waste into her district, albeit ninety miles from her posh suburban home. Schmidt supported a USEC-backed insider proposal to move all or most of the country's spent nuclear fuel to Piketon for indefinite "interim" storage.

I confess to having exposed the scheme, after I conducted a bushwhack interview of Schmidt at the 2006 Scioto County Fair. Her admission that she knew of the plan, and her characterization of it as "complex" and requiring study (she had already signed secret letters of support) told area residents all they needed to know about the congresswoman's veracity.

On Halloween of that year, the Cincinnati Enquirer published a cartoon by Jim Borgman, lampooning Schmidt as a nuclear ghoul on the doorstep of unsuspecting homeowners, with a trick-or-treat bag of nuclear waste. That started a trend of depicting Schmidt as a "wicked witch," for which I feel I may owe some apology -- to witches.

Things slowed down for the congresswoman, after she was banned from some area newspapers when they discovered that an op-ed piece submitted under her own name had actually been plagiarized from a police officer. But business picked up after the 2008 election campaign, when Schmidt spread the lie that candidate Barack Obama had "promised" USEC a $2 billion loan guarantee if he would be elected president, a promise that would have been unethical and illegal if it had been made, which it hadn't. Schmidt even organized the busing of USEC's Ohio employees to Washington, so they could lobby for the loan guarantee, on the basis of the fictitious "Obama promise."

Jean Schmidt in her infamous assault on a U.S. marine

In 2009, Jean Schmidt sent letters to her Pike County constituents, asking us to pardon the traffic and other disruption caused by construction of a nuclear reactor complex at Piketon, an accomplishment for which she claimed credit. On planet Earth, there was not even a nuclear reactor proposal -- no preliminary site permit was submitted, no site was ever specified, and, most importantly, no company offered to pay to build one. Schmidt has taken the Ohio motto "Birthplace of Invention" a bit too literally.

After the spent fuel storage and nuclear reactor fiascoes, Schmidt returned to lobbying for a loan guarantee for her corporate sponsor USEC, essentially for doing nothing. For six years, USEC failed to complete a test-cascade that would prove the viability of its uranium enrichment centrifuge technology. As a result, DOE denied the USEC loan guarantee application twice, in 2009 and 2011. Undeterred, Ms. Schmidt introduced a bill offering $300 million of federal assistance to pay for the viability demonstration that USEC had failed to accomplish.

Hearings and mark-up on the Schmidt bill were scheduled for January, but were canceled abruptly after protest from both parties. House Republicans worried that Schmidt was spoiling their partisan Solyndra narrative. On the Democratic side, according to one congressional aide who prefers not to be identified, the Schmidt bill "failed the stupid test -- it was just too stupid for committee consideration."

While Wenstrup has not advertised a position on USEC, his principled opposition to government bailouts suggests he will be a less compliant agent of the company. Though making regular donations to Schmidt, the USEC PAC made no donations to Wenstrup or any other candidates in the congressional race.

The final stickiness, best referred to as Turkish Taffy, came in a flurry of ethics charges related to unpaid legal services provided to Schmidt by attorneys with direct ties to the government of Turkey. Meanwhile, Schmidt has served as co-chair of the Turkish Caucus in Congress, though neither she nor any appreciable community in southwest Ohio is Turkish. In 2011, the House Ethics Committee ordered Schmidt to reimburse the lawyers for nearly a half million dollars in work, but area newspapers tracking the story have so far found no evidence of payment. Now that Schmidt will be out of Congress, the chances of repayment might be considered as equal to the chances that USEC will build a centrifuge plant or a nuclear reactor.

On election day, Schmidt was so confident of victory, she spent the day at a private luncheon with the Turkish ambassador in Washington DC, according to Politico. Indeed, it was her Turkey Day.

Now with ten months in Congress as a lame turkey ahead of her, Schmidt still can do substantial damage. Other GOP members of the Ohio House delegation announced on March 8, two days after the primary, that they will attempt to attach a new USEC bailout provision to the already-mucked-up transportation bill. Non-coincidentally, Schmidt sits on the Transportation Committee, where she can now trade quids for quos free of likely consequence. Her political capital, however, is spent, and titular leadership of the rump USEC forces in Congress has been turned over to the Republican congressman from northeast Ohio Steve LaTourette.

An article in the March 8 Roll Call says that Schmidt's defeat should serve as a warning to all incumbents in a Schmidt-like position, but I can't imagine whom that might include. The Jean Schmidt embarrassment remains in a class by itself.

Mystery Man Demystified

Unable to contact William "Butch" Smith directly, USA Today reporter Gregory Korte found a spokesman for the mystery candidate, Pike County Commissioner Blaine Beekman. “If you had to produce a prototype for the absolute common man," Beekman told Korte, "that’s what you get. He drives a truck. He lives with his mother.” 

Beekman should know, because, in fact, Blaine Beekman produced the Smith candidacy. Records at the Pike County Board of Elections show that Beekman circulated the majority of petitions to place Bill Smith on the ballot. Friends of Mr. Smith confirm he would not have entered the race of his own accord -- he was "volunteered" for the job. Victory came as a shock to Smith, whose one statement to the media afterward thanks "the man upstairs" for the surprising turn of events. All indications are that "the man upstairs" was Beekman. Who then is Blaine Beekman and why did he recruit a man who lives with his mother as a nominal candidate for the U.S. Congress?

Before being elected County Commissioner in 2008, Blaine Beekman served as Executive Director of the Pike County Chamber of Commerce. In that position, Beekman led the drive to demonstrate "local support" for USEC's American Centrifuge Plant and subsequently falsified local support for the storage of spent nuclear fuel in 2006.


Beekman was a founding board member of the misnamed Southern Ohio Diversification Inititiative (SODI), which was funded by the Department of Energy with initial grants of $10 million to find new nuclear projects to locate on the Piketon site, stoking what had become the drive train of the bipartisan south Ohio political machine. When privatized in 1998, USEC was given a seat on the SODI board.

Along with other Pike County Democrats, Blaine Beekman pressured presidential candidate John Kerry to endorse the USEC project before a large campaign rally near the Piketon site in September, 2004 -- the year that Kerry was infamously betrayed by south Ohio Democrats, resulting in the narrow loss of Ohio's electoral votes, and therefore the national election.

I recall a conversation I had with Blaine at the time, in his office at the Chamber of Commerce. I asked him why he appeared to be backing Kerry, when Beekman had to know that Kerry's policies on energy and nuclear nonproliferation would kill USEC's centrifuge project. Beekman turned sheepish and didn't answer me.

After that, Blaine Beekman claimed credit for producing six thousand postcards from Ohio residents supporting USEC's decision to site its centrifuge plant in Ohio, instead of Kentucky. At a DOE public hearing in March, 2007, Beekman publicly stated that the postcards supporting USEC should be taken by the government as also supporting a nuclear waste facility at Piketon. About three hundred area residents in attendance disagreed.

                                                                   

Blaine Beekman, the Wizard behind the curtain

of the mysterious Mr. Smith campaign (above)

and actor Frank Morgan in the title role as the Wizard of Oz (below)

In 2009, it was Blaine Beekman who facilitated the hoax of a nuclear reactor at Piketon by recruiting Governor Strickland to the scheme, and though he is a Democrat, Republican Jean Schmidt personally thanked Blaine Beekman for his work from the stage at the reactor promotional event hosted by USEC. Beekman became the chief local huckster of the reactor fraud, telling area residents that the nonexistent project would be "BIG! REALLY BIG!"

Beekman himself will be on the ballot in November, running for reelection as County Commissioner. Unopposed in the primary, he will be unopposed in the general election as well. Tellingly, Pike County Republicans chose not to run any candidates this year, not only for the two commissioner slots on the ballot, but for any county office, validating the old saw that the most loyal Republicans in southern Ohio are Democrats.

Beekman has made no secret of his cozy relationship with Republican lawmakers. He has regularly arranged photo ops with Congresswoman Schmidt, and on February 17 of this year, he co-hosted a "roundtable" on support for USEC's centrifuge plant at the Piketon site with U.S. Senator Rob Portman, who of course is a Republican.


Bill Smith's victorious candidacy, in other words, is a miracle only by the grace of his mouthpiece, Blaine Beekman. But why would Beekman recruit Smith, whose candidacy had to be considered too unlikely to be effectual?

The answer to that is a seldom-studied chapter in the south-central Ohio political history. During the 1980s, when Pike County was part of the old sixth congressional district, Republicans and conservative Democrats colluded in getting a man named Bob Smith to run for the Democratic nomination. This Bob Smith was also a mystery man, and like the latter-day Bill Smith (relation unknown), Bob Smith would make no campaign appearances, and he refused to circulate his photograph.

With no visual image or biographical information to go on, ill-prepared primary voters of the 1980s would often imagine that Bob Smith was either a Bob Smith they knew, or a close relation. Thus, Bob Smith repeatedly won the OH-06 congressional nomination, preventing a more effectual Democrat from challenging the consensus Republican in the general election. That scheme continued until Ted Strickland, who had been recruited into politics by a group of Pike County Democrats, including Blaine Beekman, returned from an earlier defeat to run for Congress as their boy.

Banking on no one remembering the Mr. Smith of the 1980s, Blaine Beekman simply replayed the scam. Of the 2012 Bill Smith, Beekman told USA Today: “People call him the ‘mystery candidate.’ He’s really the impossible candidate.” That must get a chuckle at the clubhouse. And of the mysterious Victory Ohio Super PAC, Beekman says: “ it clearly exists somewhere, because it spent a lot of money,” But, as quoted by USAToday, he denies knowing who is behind it. “To be frank with you, there’s no one in Pike County that would have the money to do these things. We have the highest unemployment rate in Ohio.”

Now that is what folks in these parts call a lie. Who in Pike County would have the money to tamper with a federal election by funding untraceable robocalls? Well, how about the private technology corporation that has received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies so far, to putz around on the Piketon site with no actual product to show for it?

But ne'er would I suggest that USEC is the only likely suspect. Bill Sloat, on his popular DailyBellwether blog about Ohio politics, thinks something fishy is going on, since not only has "William R. Smith" campaigned incognito, but false photographs and false biographical information have been circulated about him. Specifically, a bio of candidate Smith has been circulated, falsely suggesting that he is a member of the Steelworkers Union, the union that represents workers at the Piketon atomic site. Sloat tracked the origin of the robocalls to an out-of-service Verizon mobile phone number in Cleveland, at the other end of the state.

Cleveland, Mr. Beekman, and Ms. Schmidt, all have a definite connection. A Cleveland "entrepreneur," who is also a former USEC board member and former maverick candidate for mayor of Cleveland, has founded a company called "the Piketon Initiative for Nuclear Independence." It was this company, ePIFNI as they call it, that submitted the formal proposal for spent nuclear fuel storage at Piketon in 2006, a proposal endorsed by Congresswoman Schmidt and Chamber of Commerce Director Blaine Beekman. ePIFNI continues to submit bids for contract work at the Piketon site.

Investigation of just which wealthy entities were behind the illegal robocalls that tampered with a federal election will be referred to the Justice Department.

But for now, the little people of southern Ohio rejoice. Last week's tornadoes appear to have done some good. The house was brought down on Jeannette Marie Hoffman Schmidt. The Wicked Witch is dead!

Wicked Witch of the East from The Wizard of Oz (1939)

For more on USEC's American Centrifuge Plant see Geoffrey Sea's series at Ecowatch.org