Obama Girds for USEC Bankruptcy

by Geoffrey Sea

(With UPDATE* including repaired links)

One week ago, President Obama quietly signed a somewhat convoluted executive order, extending a state of “national emergency” in regard to risks posed by weapons-grade uranium of the Russian Federation. OMG, that sounds serious! Indeed, some sloppy media reports* suggested that the move relates to an ongoing nuclear proliferation risk, or to continuing Russian transgressions.

In reality, the measure, posted in the Federal Register last Monday in a notice reproduced below, has been undertaken at the insistence of the Russians, in order to protect Russian assets from unlawful attachment in the increasingly-likely case of a bankruptcy declaration by USEC Inc., or seizure by USEC's creditors.

Under the Megatons to Megawatts program, which is set to expire in 2013, highly-enriched uranium (HEU) from old Soviet nuclear warheads has been down-blended to reactor grade by the Russians, then sold on the international market by USEC. The concession results from a sweetheart contract given to USEC by the U.S. government as one form of federal subsidy for the fleetingly-private company. In administration of that program, from which USEC has derived substantial profit as a middle-man, reactor-grade uranium still under Russian title – i.e. not yet paid for by USEC – may wind up in USEC's possession, either in storage or in transportation.

Given the precipitous decline in USEC's financial fortunes and the jolting trade of its stock (most recently reflected in the transfer of 12% of USEC stock within a couple hours last Friday), the Russians are concerned that their assets could find themselves stuck in a bankruptcy proceeding, or abducted by USEC's creditors, who are now sharpening the talons of collateral attachment.

Lady Liberty awash in a sea of Red Ink. Indeed.

The situation is made more dire by the draconian terms of USEC's credit facility with risk-queen J.P. Morgan Chase, which subjects all of USEC's assets to “full cash dominion” – meaning that the bank can seize all of USEC's assets if USEC defaults on its credit terms. The only assets not subject to such seizure are those protected by the U.S. government under “national security” provisions.

Hence the need to protect Russian uranium in USEC's possession from being seized by the J.P. Morgan repo men. “Sensitive” dysfunctional U.S. technology encased in uranium centrifuges was similarly protected as “national-security”-related “intellectual property” (it ought to be called “ineffectual property”) as the overlooked key part of an agreement signed by USEC and the Department of Energy two weeks ago.

In other words, the USEC carcass is already being divvied up among the governmental and banking predators, but discreetly, in such a way that doesn't frighten away the watering prey of common shareholders, whose fresh blood is still required.

The "national nuclear emergency" in this case is that the rogue state of J.P. Morgan might acquire tons of stuff that used to be encased in Russian nuclear weapons.  Duck and cover!

The true import of Obama's executive order is clear only by reference to the original order  of President Clinton that has now been extended:

Government of the Russian Federation assets directly related to the implementation of the HEU Agreements currently may be subject to attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process, thereby jeopardizing the full implementation of the HEU Agreements to the detriment of U.S. foreign policy.

Misunderstanding of the relation of the new order to USEC's bankruptcy risk may be fostered by the fact that President Obama has only extended the order of a previous president, originally issued twelve years ago, in June of 2000.

But the reason that this situation still qualifies as a subject for the president's “emergency powers” is that USEC operates on a twelve-year breakdown cycle. Privatized USEC first posed a bankruptcy risk after its stock crashed in 1999, following revelations that the company had failed to develop Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation (AVLIS) technology, as promised. (“We'll see Elvis before we see AVLIS" became the standard joke.)

Now, as a closing bookend to the mad USEC privatization experiment, the company has been found to have pulled the identical scam a second time, without a viable technology to show for its claimed eleven years of centrifuge development.

Hence the panic of those darned post-Bolsheviks that their capital assets will wind up impounded at some locked USEC liquidation lot. Clinton's order carried no expiration date. There was no need for renewal if the Russians had no new concern, and details of the Obama order may add some legal protection to the Russian assets.

I'm no red-baiter, but protecting Russian state property against seizure by J.P. Morgan under the guise of a Unites States “national emergency” may be the most genuinely socialist thing that Barack Obama has ever done.

Welcome to the New World Order.

*UPDATE: It has been pointed out that prior annual extensions of the 2000 Clinton order have been issued by G.W. Bush and by Obama, however, none of those was done with the White House publicity and faked urgency attached to this extension. Obama issued a separate letter to Congress on June 25 dramatizing the otherwise mundane action, obviously intended to bolster the bogus "national security" argument for USEC federal funding, intended to confuse.

And confuse it did. Witness this pseudo-journalism from the Finance Examiner, which precisely inverts the facts of the story. According to Kenneth Schortgen, Jr.:

"Under this National Emergency and Executive Order, the United States is seizing assets and property owned or managed by the Russian Federation relating to nuclear items and programs tied to Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU)"

Um, no. The United States is NOT seizing Russian assets, it is PROTECTING Russian assets from seizure. But Schortgen's confusion emanates directly from the pomp and prose of Obama's "national emergency" grandstanding, which itself reflects a line of disinformation that comes straight from USEC Inc., as the company continues to try to Rangel federal funds through a supposedly-banned earmark. No misspelling.

___________________________________________________________________

From the White House:

For Immediate Release: June 18, 2012

Notice: Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to the Risk of Nuclear Proliferation Created by the Accumulation of Weapons-Usable Fissile Material in the Territory of the Russian Federation

"On June 21, 2000, the President issued Executive Order 13159 (the "order") blocking property and interests in property of the Government of the Russian Federation that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons that are directly related to the implementation of the Agreement Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Russian Federation Concerning the Disposition of Highly Enriched Uranium Extracted from Nuclear Weapons, dated February 18, 1993, and related contracts and agreements (collectively, the "HEU Agreements"). The HEU Agreements allow for the downblending of highly enriched uranium derived from nuclear weapons to low enriched uranium for peaceful commercial purposes. The order invoked the authority, inter alia, of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701-1706) and declared a national emergency to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the risk of nuclear proliferation created by the accumulation of a large volume of weapons-usable fissile material in the territory of the Russian Federation.

The national emergency declared on June 21, 2000, must continue beyond June 21, 2012, to provide continued protection from attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process for the property and interests in property of the Government of the Russian Federation that are directly related to the implementation of the HEU Agreements and subject to U.S. jurisdiction. Therefore, in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. l622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency with respect to the risk of nuclear proliferation created by the accumulation of weapons-usable fissile material in the territory of the Russian Federation.

This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.

BARACK OBAMA"

DOE Doubles Down on USEC Dementia

by Geoffrey Sea

In a major concession to the Sherrod Brown 2012 reelection campaign and the Rob Portman veepstakes bid, the US Department of Energy this morning announced a bailout package for USEC Inc. The done deal, begging to be undone, locates the current, and assumed to be outgoing, Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, as a resident alien from Planet Bizarro.

According to the announcement, on June 12 – one day after the anniversary of USEC's revelatory centrifuge crash of June 11, 2011, – DOE and USEC signed agreements committing the federal government to pay up to $280 million over the next two years in exchange for USEC's nuclear garbage.

The first installment, now paid according to a USEC news release, is an $87.7 million assumption of liability by the government for title and disposal costs of thousands of tons of depleted uranium waste produced by USEC's allegedly private operations. Some additional $190 million – or whatever USEC should require to maintain the standard of living to which it has become accustomed – will be paid by this allegedly budget-conscious Administration to take title and control over USEC's trash-heap whirligigs, already written off by USEC as worthless, also known as AC-100 centrifuges.

The DOE-USEC agreement is far from a guarantee of the project moving ahead. USEC's creditors, led by JP Morgan Chase, must agree that the arrangement  satisfies the terms of USEC's credit facility, which places stringent conditions on any further pursuit of the non-profitable American Centrifuge venture. Congress must complete the project's financing, in the face of growing congressional criticism. And even DOE is exhibiting signs of less than total resolve. A DOE official was quoted by Politico today as saying:

 “Our hope here is that this all works. But if it doesn’t, we have a number of options that  we can consider."

It was with such optimism that great fortunes like that of Enron were lost.

Congressman Edward Markey, a leading critic of the proposed USEC bailout, released this summary statement in response to the DOE-USEC announcement:

"The decision by the Department of Energy to provide $88 million to purchase non-functional centrifuges from USEC, whose entire market value is $92 million, is a complete and total waste of taxpayer dollars. It underscores the need for GAO to investigate the legal and policy basis for the continued bailouts of a clearly failing company."

One may forgive Congressman Markey for being a bit confused. DOE did propose to buy USEC's defunct centrifuges, many of which were destroyed in last year's crash. Realizing the legal complications of such a purchase, however, DOE has chosen instead to pay good greenbacks for USEC's rusting cylinders of radwaste, and USEC has offered to throw in its old centrifuge junk for free. Such a bargain! That Daniel Poneman (Deputy Secretary of Energy) must be a tough negotiator!

Hey Dan, I have a couple tons of rusted farm machinery mixed with horse shit to sell you. More biomass energy potential than anything USEC has to offer, I guarantee.

 South Ohio Turkey Vulture circling near the USEC carcass.

Photo by Larry Henry

According to a Form 8-K filed by USEC with the SEC today, a set of new “milestones” for the project has been adopted, which is:

May 2014 - Successful completion of the American Centrifuge Cascade Demonstration Test Program
June 2014 - Commitment to proceed with commercial operation
November 2014 - Secure firm financing commitment(s) for the construction of the commercial American Centrifuge Plant with an annual capacity of approximately 3.5 million separative work units ("SWU") per year
July 2017 - Begin commercial American Centrifuge Plant operations
September 2018 - Commercial American Centrifuge Plant annual capacity at 1 million SWU per year
September 2020 - Commercial American Centrifuge Plant annual capacity of approximately 3.5 million

This is a work of creative fiction meriting some sci fi-fantasy prize, composed for an audience with unlimited capacity for the suspension of disbelief. All of the dates are between seven and nine years later than the original milestones set for the American Centrifuge project, milestones that were not nearly met because the technology in question was already outmoded and ill-suited to the task when Ronal Reagan's administration canceled the first iteration of the project in 1985. By 2017, AC-100 machines will be categorical antiques, more than forty years old and totally non-competitive with new technologies being developed in more than half a dozen countries.

Note that “firm financing commitments” from the private sector are not scheduled until November 2014, that is AFTER the 2014 mid-term election, meaning that USEC-puppet incumbents hope this charade will carry them through not one but two political cycles. If the “firm financing commitments” were actually expected to come, they would, of course, be scheduled to happen in advance of the election. Late November in an even-numbered year is the season for programmed disappointment in south Ohio .

Note also that the June 2014 “commitment to proceed with commercial operation” falls just shy of October 1, 2014, USEC's due date for repayment of $530 million in bond debt – bonds that USEC floated in 2007 that were supposed to pay for construction of the commercial centrifuge plant. Money, it should be mentioned, that USEC has already spent, before construction of a commercial plant has even started. Having your construction bonds come due before construction is even initiated is not considered a stellar business practice.

In other words, the schedule has been rigged to soak U.S. taxpayers for a maximum amount of public funds, while extracting from Ohio voters support for seven cycles of USEC-booster bozo candidates, before going bust in carefully-orchestrated increments in 2014. Quite a scam.

And there are a few other big problems with the latest DOE Deal of Deals:

1. Lots of “national security” mambo-jumbo but neither DOE nor USEC has yet specified any actual national security requirement met by investing in a forty-year old defunct technology.
2. Once again DOE has dispensed with all of the niceties of legal public process – public notice, public comments, hearings, consideration of alternatives – merely to suit USEC's proprietary scheduling needs.
3. RD&D was proposed in October 2011 as a necessary two-year project. Now, after almost a year of no progress, DOE and USEC say they can do the same thing in only a year. There is no reason to believe them.
4. How does USEC plan to meet that $530 million debt to bondholders? Without an answer to that, all the rest is gobbledygook.
5. DOE has signed agreements in order to meet USEC's June 15 creditor deadline that bind Congress to future appropriations which Congress has not approved, violating Secretary Chu's 2011 commitment that RD&D would be done only at Congress's discretion. No bill of appropriation for 2012 or 2013 has yet been been passed despite numerous attempts, but now DOE has committed to fund more than half the project, in explicit violation of a number of U.S. laws.
6. What are the penalties if USEC fails to achieve the new milestones as it failed to achieve all the past milestones with no penalties? The fundamental problem of DOE not providing a realistic incentive structure attached to the provision of public funds remains.*
7. What are the provisions for site decommissioning and what will be the amount of the surety bond to cover site Decontamination and Decommissioning if the project is a failure? Who will pay for that bond given USEC's financial distress and how will collateral be provided since USEC's collateral is committed to its bank lenders? Most importantly, who will make the decision on project termination and when will that decision be made?
8. A subsidiary shell-game is being played. USEC already created a subsidiary called American Centrifuge LLC to receive government funds with accounting controls, and the NRC licenses were transferred to that subsidiary. Now USEC has created a new subsidiary called American Centrifuge Demonstration LLC. Neither of those holds any assets. Why was a new subsidiary necessary when the old one was created for the same purpose?
9. If no public funds can be diverted from the project to pay USEC corporate expenses, as DOE promises, then how will that help USEC's bottom line? USEC is still running at a persistent loss, at the edge of bankruptcy, with no viable near-term profit stream. Why invest huge amounts of public funds in a company about to go bust, with looming debts?
10. If ACP technology is such hot stuff, why won't either DOE or USEC release the financial and technical reviews that were performed twice, in 2009 and 2011, as part of the analysis of USEC's loan guarantee application?

These items beg the question of why the US Department of Energy would enter into a deal so manifestly rotten for the government. The answer is apparent. USEC played the political extortion game too well. The company threatened to go bankrupt just before a hotly-contested presidential election, in the state that is the most coveted electoral prize.

Of course DOE is willing to pay for USEC nuclear garbage. If USEC goes into liquidation, DOE might be stuck with the company's radwaste anyway – it sits on federal land.

What we will see from this deal, at most, is two more years of corruption, delay, and non-development at the Piketon site.

Former U.S. Senator from Ohio George Voinovich once asked, in a moment of candor, whether giving more federal funds to USEC wasn't “throwing money down the rat hole.”

Memo to Ohio voters: The rats of both major political parties have now officially endorsed the rat hole as good politics for the Buckeye State.

*UPDATE: The "penalties" for failing to achieve the milestones are summarized in the 8-K form filed by USEC with the SEC. The "penalty" is that USEC, would be removed from the commercial ACP project (which would de facto be over anyway) and would be paid up to a $665 million royalty for "technical improvements" it had made to the centrifuge design.  Now that's what I'd call an incentive -- to fail. Obviously there ain't gonna be no commercial centrifuge plant at Piketon, Ohio.

Congressmen Request GAO Investigation of DOE Support for USEC

Questioning the legality of past and proposed methods of DOE support for USEC, Inc., Congressmen Ed Markey and Michael Burgess today called for a thorough investigation by the Government Accountability Office. Burgess and Markey had previously co-sponsored an amendment to eliminate a proposed 2013 appropriation for USEC. Today's press release from Markey's office follows:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 12, 2012

Contact: Giselle Barry (Markey) 202-225-2836

Whitney Thompson (Burgess) 202-225-7772

Markey, Burgess Call For GAO Investigation of DOE Support for Near-Bankrupt USEC

  

Precarious financial situation, contravention of laws, inaccurate national security benefits underscore risk for bailout of nuclear enrichment company

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressmen Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Michael C. Burgess, M.D. (R-Texas) today wrote the Government Accountability Office (GAO) calling for an investigation of the Departments of Energy’s (DOE) continued support for the floundering United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC). In their letter to the GAO, the lawmakers point to USEC’s inability to avoid insolvency in the absence of continued DOE bailouts, most recently in the form of $44 million in assistance so that the company could continue work on USEC’s flawed centrifuge technology and tens of thousands of tons of free uranium transferred from the Energy Department to stave off an immediate shut down of its Kentucky enrichment facility. Additionally, the Congressmen cite the recent credit downgrading, technical problems, and inaccurate assertions about the national security benefits as reasons why the nuclear enrichment program may never reach full commercialization.

“We’ve been told this earmark is all about avoiding risk to our national security, but the real risks of this nuclear bailout is for taxpayers who will be on the hook for questionable government handouts that are worth more than the entire company,” said Rep. Markey. “The GAO should immediately commence an investigation into DOE’s ongoing support for USEC before we throw more money at a company whose junk bond status and junk technology make it better suited for the budgetary junk heap.”

“The Department of Energy has been harming the uranium mining industry for years, dumping excess uranium tails into the market to prop up a failing company that couldn't stand on its own feet. As a result, thousands of miners from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, and others, have had their livelihoods put in jeopardy,” said Rep. Burgess. “It is time the Department of Energy is held accountable for their activities. This GAO report will be the first step in bringing justice for an industry still hurting damaged by Department of Energy policies.”

A copy of the letter to the GAO can be found HERE. 

In the letters, Reps. Markey and Burgess request the GAO’s investigation to examine issues including: 

· The assertion that the USEC program is needed in order to fulfill a national security need appears to be inaccurate. The Department of Energy’s assertion that continuing to bail out USEC is the only way the U.S. can get the tritium needed for America’s nuclear weapons program appears to be untrue. Rep. Markey requested reports from the Congressional Research Service that dispute this claim. Additionally, it appears as if the USEC centrifuges themselves use foreign technology, raising questions as to whether even USEC is eligible to do this nuclear weapons work using DOE’s own questionable eligibility criteria. 

· The Department’s recent uranium transfer announcement may violate the USEC Privatization Act and may additionally not include adequate safeguards. The USEC Privatization Act requires DOE to ensure that transfers, including the one announced May 15 to avoid shutdown of the USEC facility in Paducah, Kentucky, will not have an adverse material impact on the domestic uranium mining, conversion, or enrichment industry. The Department had to alter its long-standing standard for assessing such adverse impacts in order to enter into the agreement, agreed to transfer forms of uranium that GAO has previously concluded DOE lacked the statutory authority to transfer, and does not appear to have ensured that it has any mechanism to oversee or enforce the terms of the agreement.

· The Department of Energy and USEC may be out of compliance with other statutes, including the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). For example, the Natural Resources Committee Democratic staff has been told that the stakeholder consultation processes required under NHPA are not being properly performed at USEC’s Ohio facility, and the Department’s current NEPA analysis appears to be based on outdated assumptions regarding the amount of uranium it plans to transfer to private entities.

More information on Rep. Markey’s work on USEC, including letters to DOE and recent floor statements related to his recent legislative efforts to rescind funding for the troubled company, can he found HERE.

STOP THE USEC SCANDAL NOW: An Open Letter to Secretary of Energy Chu

June 11, 2012

Honorable Steven Chu

Secretary of Energy, U.S. Department of Energy

1000 Independence Ave., SW

Washington DC 20585

ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF THE JUNE 11, 2011,

CENTRIFUGE CRASH

STOP THE USEC SCANDAL NOW

Mr, Secretary,

Today is the first anniversary of the accident at Piketon, Ohio, which caused six USEC centrifuges to crash and one to breach from a simple loss-of-power. Uranium release was averted only because most or all of the centrifuges were not running uranium at the time, but that circumstance itself raises grave questions about the so-called “American Centrifuge” project at Piketon.

Why, after forty years of AC-100 development, and many billions of dollars of U.S. government expense and subsidies, have only 38 centrifuges been manufactured, all of those now written off as a tax loss by USEC? Why did USEC fail to complete its NRC-licensed Lead Cascade demonstration over more than six years since the contractual deadline for completion, and what penalties has DOE imposed for that failure? Why did DOE allow and encourage USEC to obtain a construction and operating license for a full-scale commercial plant before any completion of even a small-scale demonstration project? How can USEC now claim to have completed “one million hours of centrifuge testing” when no uranium was being run for the majority of the testing period? Exactly what was being tested?

And most importantly, why is your Administration proposing to undo the USEC Privatization Act and effectively renationalize this long-failed project without any repeal or amendment of the UPA by the Congress of the United States? In October of 2011, after rejecting USEC's application for a $2 billion loan guarantee for a second time, you proposed a two-year program of “Research, Development, and Demonstration (RD&D)” by which the federal government would allegedly do what USEC has failed to do through its promised Lead Cascade. But your proposal is now nonsensical for the following reasons:

1. You proposed a two-year RD&D program, obviously timed for completion not in regard to any technical plan but for when USEC will lose its principal source of uranium through the Megatons to Megawatts program, which expires at the end of 2013, and before USEC's $530 million debt to bondholders is due in 2014. But now at least a year will have elapsed without progress on the RD&D program. How can a planned two-year program be completed in only one year? Or was your initial proposal non-serious and intended only to delay a USEC bankruptcy but not to accomplish any material R&D objective? And even if magically completed and successful, how could a commercial plant then be financed since USEC's bond debt will immediately be due?

2. You repeatedly stated that Congress would have to pass appropriations for the RD&D program for it to proceed, in response to pointed criticism from Congress and GAO about past DOE assistance to USEC accomplished outside of legal congressional appropriation channels. However, after Congress failed to pass such appropriations (no such appropriation has yet passed both chambers for 2012 or 2013), with congressional opposition mounting, you reneged on that reform commitment and gave USEC $44 million in liability waiver in March of this year. Then in May you gave USEC hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidy through the extra-legal 5-party Paducah deal. DOE has further posted a proposal to buy USEC's destroyed and worthless centrifuges for an unspecified amount. And according to statements by USEC this past week, DOE intends to award USEC an additional $82 million in liability waiver, in time to meet USEC's proprietary June 15 deadline with bank creditors, led by JP Morgan, which is now under its own congressional scrutiny for investing in bad risks. What is the legal basis for such extraordinary assistance to a private company outside of congressional mandate?
   
   
3. When you proposed the RD&D program last October, you said in your letters to Congress that it would build “720 centrifuges” at the Piketon site. Without correcting yourself, that number was somehow altered by USEC and other parties to read 120 centrifuges, not 720. But given the elapsed time, the non-performance of R&D on new centrifuge improvements, and USEC's admissions of financial incapacity, it's very clear that no new centrifuge array will be constructed at Piketon in the foreseeable future. USEC is struggling just to stay in business. The debate in Congress over an RD&D expenditure foundered on different ideas of exactly how DOE would spend such an appropriation, especially with DOE stressing the “national security” and “defense-related” aspects of the program, as opposed to commercial viability. It's fair to say that RD&D now lacks any definition at all. What exactly is the current DOE proposal for centrifuge RD&D?
   
   
4. During the review of USEC's loan guarantee application, DOE insisted on creation of a new subsidiary to receive any American Centrifuge publicly-backed funds with accounting controls. That subsidiary, American Centrifuge LLC., was created, and the NRC licenses for Lead Cascade and ACP were transferred to it. Now, however, all talk of that subsidiary has been abandoned and USEC suggests that RD&D funds will be paid either to the USEC parent company or to the United States Enrichment Corporation subsidiary, which holds most of USEC's assets, thus circumventing the accounting controls put in place to assure the integrity of publicly-backed funds. Will DOE insist that all RD&D funds, including proceeds from liability waivers and other forms of assistance, be paid to American Centrifuge LLC to assure accounting controls? If not, then isn't it obvious that that RD&D is simply an illegal conduit for pumping funds to USEC Inc. without resultant investment in centrifuge technology?

The Department of Energy commissioned an engineering investigation of the June 11 crash by Parsons Corporation, and that report was subsequently suppressed. A copy was not even shared with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission until after NRC secured the report from bootleg (not to imply illegal) sources. SONG has now made the report, obtained independently, available to the public.

http://songsheetohio.blogspot.com/2012/06/secret-crash-report-reveals-usec.html

Reasons for the report's suppression are readily apparent from the text, and explain why insiders with integrity insured that the report did come to the attention of NRC investigators, Congress, and the public. Aside from revealing that USEC's management practices, employee training, and safety culture were nowhere near the standards necessary for a commercial nuclear operation, the Parsons report reveals that the very concept of a commercial centrifuge project under construction at Piketon is dubious.

Specifically, the report discloses that the principal R&D facility for the USEC centrifuge program is not Piketon at all, but a federal facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, designated K-1600. Two prior USEC centrifuge crashes occurred at K-1600, earlier in 2011 – crashes that were undisclosed to NRC, Congress, and the public. Further, the Parsons report discloses how little uranium has been run through the Piketon Lead Cascade, raising the question of the purpose of the testing program, since running uranium is necessary to obtain the efficiency and cost data relevant to a commercial project.

Congress and the public have been hoodwinked into supporting “the American Centrifuge Plant” on the promise of a full-scale commercial plant in Ohio, one that will bring “4,000 Ohio jobs” along with an equal number of jobs in other states. It now appears, however, that both DOE and USEC have known for a long time that such a commercial plant will never materialize. Even the R&D phase will necessarily be based in Oak Ridge, not at Piketon, and that will be focused on whatever “national security” objectives DOE and its National Nuclear Security Administration hold dear, not on creation of a viable commercial plant.

Ohio workers, Ohio residents, and perhaps even Ohio politicians have been deceived.

The Great American Subterfuge

The scandal goes well beyond the loss of promised jobs and the wasted billions of dollars in federal expenditures. In order to maintain the ruse of a future commercial ACP, the Piketon “centrifuge buildings” built in the 1970s were contaminated for a second time, needlessly and probably at government cleanup expense. In 1985, the Reagan Administration allowed those same buildings to be contaminated by test runs of uranium in AC-100 machines, even though technicians and project planners already knew that the centrifuges employed would not be commercially viable.

After shutdown of the Gas Centrifuge Enrichment Plant program in 1985, DOE failed to make any public disclosure of why the program had failed or why the test run and contamination had been permitted with no viable plan for commercialization. In March of 2005, the DOE Inspector General found that DOE's PPPO office, under the direction of Bill Murphie, had authorized up to $250 million in proprietary USEC expenses to be paid by DOE in alleged cleanup of the GCEP buildings improperly. Again no public disclosure was made of why USEC was not then required to reimburse the U.S. Treasury for those expenses. Those lacks of disclosure preconditioned precise repetition of the scandal with USEC's phantom “Lead Cascade.”

And the tragedy underlying that vicious cycle is that throughout the period, from the initiation of GCEP in the 1970s, DOE has utterly failed to comply with environmental and historic preservation laws at the Piketon site. Such compliance would have required that DOE study the important ecological and cultural landscape largely destroyed to make room for the useless “centrifuge” buildings, and consult with knowledgeable and interested parties about the impacts of federal undertakings and how to mitigate them.

But DOE could not and did not disclose the real nature of its undertakings at that site, which were never to construct a commercial centrifuge enrichment plant. Rather, DOE has consistently pursued secret and dubious “national security” missions under no legal framework, or pure political political motives connected to Ohio's cherished electoral votes.

With regard to the latter, the USEC scandal should be compared to the Solyndra scandal. In the Solyndra case, improper White House influence on DOE decision-making was alleged but could not be proven. In the USEC case, on the other hand, political White House fingerprints are all over the place. DOE memorandums released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that White House operative Joseph Aldy, with practically no experience in government, led the “rollout” of the USEC loan guarantee denial in 2009, along with Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman. “Denial” in this instance is a misnomer, however, because the decision to turn down USEC for a loan guarantee was accompanied by other hurried decisions to award USEC $45 million in “technical assistance,” along with $150-$200 million for a no-bid contract to do cleanup work at Piketon, cleanup work of which there is no evidence of performance.

In other words, the political operative Aldy, along with Poneman and Assistant Secretary Inez Triay, crafted a “compensatory package” by which USEC was given up to $245 million as a gift, in place of a $2 billion loan guarantee, a pretty good bargain for USEC as any loan shark would opine. That appears to have been done only for the purpose of softening any blow to Ohio's fragile political sensibilities, a continuing scam that you sir, Mr. Secretary, have continued with additional gifts and favors for USEC.

Mr. Secretary, you were awarded a Nobel Prize in physics for your work on atomic laser isotope separation. Perhaps more than anyone, you know that USEC's forty-year-old centrifuge technology has no commercial future. Why then are you staking your name and reputation on this deception?

Enrichment Schemes

The assumption appears to be that Ohio voters want this cesspool of corruption dug deep into our state's soil, or that we shall reward those who steal from public coffers while lying to us with our votes. But I remind you, sir, that we have law-abiding citizens in Ohio, and even if parochial interests prevail, the USEC enrichment scheme has accrued to the benefit of Tennessee and Maryland, not Ohio. Ohio is stuck with no commercial jobs prospect, a double-time contaminated site, and no party coming forth with an offer to clean up the mess and redevelop. We are aware, sir, that USEC has pledged its collateral to its bank creditors, leaving the USEC D&D commitment at Piketon unsecured.

Where, Dr. Chu, will DOE obtain the funds to decontaminate, decommission, and redevelop the centrifuge site at Piketon after USEC is deeper in bankruptcy and it has skipped town?

Part of the tragedy of the abrogation of environmental and preservation law is that legal process would have permitted the consideration of alternative proposals for Piketon site development, which if they had been pursued, would have produced real jobs for this community, while saving the federal government a whole lot of money. In 1983, nearly thirty years ago, I was hired by the Piketon local of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union to negotiate potential alternate uses of the GCEP site (now the ACP site), should GCEP be canceled (which it was).

But DOE refused to so negotiate. During the Reagan Administration, the doors were shut. Though Piketon and Paducah workers then had support from the governors of Ohio and Kentucky and other public officials, DOE would not engage in any conversation about how any part of the Piketon and Paducah sites could be utilized following the end of enrichment activities.

I'm sorry to say that in 2012, the response of the Obama Administration, in regards to both Piketon and Paducah, is even worse. Not only has Deputy Secretary Poneman refused to engage in a conversation about alternate use of the ACP site, as the project clearly winds toward termination, but NNSA, which claims to manage the site, will not even provide a public point of contact.

This situation is unacceptable, and I might add, inadvisable, if your attention is focused on the coming commotion in November. In regard to the USEC shuffle, enough is enough.

In 2007, SONG provided to DOE petitions with the signatures of more than 5,000 area residents calling for a ban on spent nuclear fuel storage at Piketon, and for creation of a Citizens Advisory Board. DOE did respond to the SONG petition by creating, for the first time, a Site-Specific Advisory Board, though the SSAB is inadequate on two grounds. First, its members are riddled with conflicts of interest since numerous members are employed by site contractors including USEC. We got a Contractor Advisory Board not a Citizens Advisory Board. Second, the SSAB's mandate specifically excludes anything related to USEC or the ACP project and site. Thus there remains no CAB at Piketon exercising citizen oversight over the ACP project and site.

Now, SONG demands the following:

1. RESPECT the land and history of the Piketon community and stop regarding this federal site as as some kind of national sacrifice area.
   
   
2. ACKNOWLEDGE that the commercial ACP project is terminated and that there is no commercial component to any proposed RD&D project that may be continued at Oak Ridge.
   
   
3. END illegal payments, subsidies, liability waivers, and transfers of material to USEC. Respect the USEC Privatization Act and end government involvement in the commercial uranium enrichment business. If USEC's management decisions lead it into bankruptcy, so be it.
   
   
4. WITHDRAW the proposal for an RD&D program until such time as DOE can clarify the precise nature of a “national security” program needed at Oak Ridge.
   
   
5. COMPLY with the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and all other federal environmental and preservation laws by engaging in required consultations studying impacts, and considering alternatives to federal undertakings BEFORE agency decisions about the commitment of funds or resources are made.
   
   
6. REMOVE the USEC lease from management by NNSA and place that management in an office with normal civilian practices and compliance mechanisms.
   
   
7. DISCLOSE all past federal funding, subsidies, transfers, waivers, no-bid contracts, and other forms of support for USEC, and the real purposes for that support. And disclose the details governing decontamination & decommissioning of ACP.
   
   
8. ABOLISH the SSAB at Piketon, because it is riddled with conflicts of interest, and replace it with a true Citizens Advisory Board, on which salaried contractor employees cannot serve, with jurisdiction over the entire federal reservation at Piketon and all federal undertakings at the site.
   
   
9. REPLACE the current “Community Reuse Organization” at Piketon with a public-interest non-profit entity responsive to real community needs and not attached to USEC and other site contractors.
   
   
10. ENGAGE this community in a frank conversation about how to decommission the ACP project given USEC's financial situation, and in how to reconceptualize the general Piketon cleanup given the end of ACP.
    
    
11. ANSWER the questions posed in this letter, questions begged by the long history of official deception and disinformation at Piketon.
    
    
12. COME to Piketon. Mr. Secretary, it is time that you face this community in one or a series of town meetings that SONG offers to co-host.
    
    
13. FIRE Bill Murphie's ass as quickly as you can say his name.

Please don't hesitate to contact me. You will find much more information about the USEC situation at http://ecowatch.org/gsea-articles/and at http://SONGSheetOhio.blogspot.com. It is high time for a new era at Piketon.

For Southern Ohio Neighbors Group,

Geoffrey Sea

fence-line resident

phone: 740-835-1508

e-mail: SargentsPigeon@aol.com

website: http://SONGSheetOhio.blogspot.com

House Votes on USEC-Bailout Blocking Amendments Postponed

Floor votes on amendments to the 2013 Energy & Water appropriations bill that would block a USEC bailout were scheduled for last night, June 5, but were postponed under the Boehner "need-more-time-for-arm-twisting" rule. Presumably, those votes will happen today, June 6.

The Burgess-Markey Amendment would eliminate the proposed $100 million appropriation for a "Research, Development, and Demonstration" program, otherwise known as Rake, Deceive, and Deplete the taxpayers. Another proposed amendment would remove the Department of Energy's ability to "trade" uranium with USEC in a manner that constitutes an unrestricted giveaway to the company.

Pete Visclosky (D-IN) surprised USEC boosters on Tuesday by speaking in favor of the USEC-killing amendments. Visclosky is the ranking Democrat on the Energy & Water Appropriations Subcommittee, so his stance is influential, and may be considered as the trigger for the Boehner arm-twisting rule.

USEC is operating under a clouded two-week extension on its credit facility for obtaining certain congressional commitment of funding, expiring June 15, so room for additional delays is running out for the company.

UPDATE: The amendment barring the dumping of inventory uranium, a mechanism used to bail out USEC, is Lummis-Hinjosa. Cynthia Lummis is the Republican congresswoman from Wyoming. Ruben Hinjosa is a Democratic congressman from Texas.

Votes on the two amendments are still delayed but are expected after 3 pm today, June 6.

Amendments Seek to Remove USEC Bailout from 2013 Energy Budget

U.S. Representatives Michael Burgess (R-TX) and Edward Markey (D-MA) are sponsoring an amendment to strike the proposed $100 million bailout provision for an ambiguous "Research, Development, and Demonstration Project," as it appears in the 2013 Energy&Water appropriations bill. It is expected that amendments will be debated and voted on this evening, June 5, with a vote on the bill on the House floor tomorrow. Other amendments seek to strike the shady uranium transfers by which DOE has funded USEC through the back door. 

UPDATE:  The amendment barring the dumping of inventory uranium, a mechanism used to bail out USEC, is Lummis-Hinjosa. Cynthia Lummis is the Republican congresswoman from Wyoming. Ruben Hinjosa is a Democratic congressman from Texas.

Two "Dear Colleague" letters from Markey and Burgess follow:

SUPPORT THE BURGESS-MARKEY AMENDMENT

From: The Honorable Edward J. Markey
Sent By: michal.freedhoff@mail.house.gov
Bill: H.R. 5325
Date: 6/5/2012

JUNE 5, 2012

USEC: the United States Earmark Corporation

Dear Colleague:

Here are some of the most compelling reasons why we should not be providing further subsidies to the United States Enrichment Corporation:

When the Treasury Department was asked whether it thought continued support for the company put the taxpayers at risk, it said that “extreme care should be taken in putting the taxpayer at risk or offering any exposure to the taxpayer.”

On May 15, the company was downgraded by Standard and Poor’s to a CCC+ rating and placed on a Creditwatch with negative implications. This means that the companies' bonds are considered to be junk bond and its stock is considered to carry substantial risk.

The Department of Energy is currently preparing to BUY up to forty of the company’s centrifuges for a reported $82 million dollars, bringing the FY 2012 total support for this failed centrifuge program to $126 million.

The $100 million earmark contained in the Energy and Water Appropriations Act exceeds the $86 million dollar market capitalization of the ENTIRE company.

USEC was recently warned that it was in danger of being de-listed by the New York Stock Exchange. Delisting would mean that the company’s stock would essentially be reduced to speculative "penny stock" status, reducing the market for the company’s shares.

USEC’s cash is subject to “full cash dominion” to its creditor, JP Morgan. This means that its cash is the property of JP Morgan, which uses it to pay outstanding loans and other obligations before the cash is made available for USEC to use for its operations.

The supporters of the USEC earmark say that our international treaty obligations require that “domestic” uranium enrichment technology be used to manufacture the nuclear fuel that will be used to produce tritium. But this is just not the case. When DOE analyzed several options for making fuel that would be used to obtain tritium, it actually found that using highly enriched uranium that it already has could be down-blended by Nuclear Fuel Services—the company that currently produces nuclear fuel for the U.S. Navy’s fleet of aircraft carriers and submarines—and that this would cost taxpayers HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS LESS than obtaining the services from the United States Enrichment Corporation. There is simply no reason to continue to bail out this company. There are other alternatives.

Support the BURGESS-MARKEY amendment, and end the taxpayer bailout of this failing company. This amendment is supported by Taxpayers for Common Sense Action, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Friends of the Earth, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, Union of Concerned Scientists, National Taxpayers Union, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. For more information, please have your staff contact James Decker (Rep. Burgess, 5-7772) or Michal Freedhoff (Rep. Markey, 5-2836)

Sincerely,

Michael C. Burgess Edward J. Markey

---

Strike the $100 Million Bailout to a Failing Company from the E&W Bill

From: The Honorable Michael C. Burgess
Sent By: James.Decker@mail.house.gov
Bill: H.R. 5325
Date: 6/5/2012

STRIKE the $100 million bailout for the United States Enrichment Corporation

Support the Burgess-Markey amendment to the Energy &Water Appropriations bill

Dear Colleague:

Congress privatized the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) with the expectation that the U.S. Government would no longer participate in the uranium enrichment business. Congress reasoned, and rightly so, that uranium enrichment should be a commercial activity in the United States. Thus, a commercial market was created for the enrichment of fuel grade uranium. However, USEC has never been able to compete without subsidies from the federal government. Despite the economic failures of this enrichment company - the business reported a net income loss of $540.7 million in 2011 alone and it is in danger of being de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange – taxpayers continue to be forced to bail it out.
The Department of Energy is currently preparing to spend $82 million to purchase USEC’s centrifuges, bringing the total support for this failed centrifuge program to $126 million in this year alone. And that doesn’t even include the hundreds of millions of dollars the Department of Energy has also provided in gifts of free uranium that the company can then enrich and re-sell.
Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a company worth less than $90 million dollars is absurd enough. But this bill gives USEC ANOTHER $100 million by creating a new domestic uranium enrichment research, development, and demonstration (RD&D), for which only USEC is eligible.
Some claim that we need to continue to subsidize USEC because there is no other way the U.S. can obtain the tritium needed for our nuclear weapons arsenal, but this is false. There are other companies that could perform these services and not run afoul of international agreements. And when DOE analyzed several options for making tritium, it actually found that using highly enriched uranium it has already set aside would be down-blended by Nuclear Fuel Services, the company that currently produces nuclear fuel for the U.S. Navy’s fleet of aircraft carriers and submarines, would cost taxpayers HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS LESS than obtaining the services from USEC.
Support the BURGESS-MARKEY amendment, and end the taxpayer bailout of this failing company. This amendment issupported by Taxpayers for Common Sense Action, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Friends of the Earth, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, Union of Concerned Scientists, National Taxpayers Union, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Please contact James Decker (Rep. Burgess 5-7772) or Michal Freedhoff (Rep. Markey 5-2836) with any questions.
Sincerely,


Michael C. Burgess, M.D. Edward J. Markey

Secret Crash Report Reveals USEC Centrifuges as Rube Goldberg Machines

by Geoffrey Sea

After claiming to “invest” two billion dollars in the project but having produced only thirty-eight test centrifuges, USEC Inc. had virtually none of the technical measures, management practices, or safety culture in place to make the project safe or viable on a commercial scale. Whether USEC had the financial wherewithal to undertake a commercial centrifuge venture was also highly dubious. Those assessments come from a government-commissioned engineering report on the June 11, 2011, crash of six centrifuges at the USEC facility near Piketon, Ohio.

The report, done by Parsons Corporation as part of the Department of Energy's review of USEC's application for a federal loan guarantee, was never made public or available to Congress by USEC nor by any federal agency, and it was not disclosed by DOE to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is charged with licensing and regulating safety at the facility, before NRC completed its own, less-thorough investigation in April of 2012. The Parsons report was kept secret even though USEC, allegedly a private company, has sought backing for a $2 billion federal loan guarantee and a $300 million federal bailout package, and Congress has been asked to make appropriations for USEC without benefit of the report. It is made available for Congress and the public for the first time here, courtesy of Commonwealth Environmental Services of Paducah, Kentucky, which has posted the document at my request. (CES was not my source -- I provided the document to CES for posting.)

Three months to the day after world attention focused on the loss-of-power catastrophe at the Daiichi nuclear complex, an eerily similar failure of backup electricity caused the crash of six centrifuges, and one breach, at Piketon. USEC had provided the uranium fuel then in process of melting down inside three of the Japanese reactors, and was nearing a June 30 deadline on attainment of a "conditional commitment" on the federal loan guarantee. TEPCO, the Daiichi operator now with all its nuclear reactors shut down and reporting fresh leaks of radioactive water at Fukushima, auspiciously had provided the lead potential customer endorsement for USEC's proposed "American Centrifuge Plant" in Ohio.

A "crash" in this context means the destruction of a centrifuge generally from overheating damage. A "breach" means that the outer casing was ruptured. The breach on 6-11-11 did not result in a release of uranium, only because most of the centrifuges were not running uranium at the time. This is itself an indictment of the project -- USEC was "testing" centrifuges at Piketon for almost a year without any uranium, raising the question of just what was being tested. USEC has refused to address that question.

Following the June centrifuge crash, with the Solyndra scandal breaking (Solyndra had restructured its loan in February and would file for bankruptcy in August of 2011), the U.S. Department of Energy commissioned Parsons to evaluate the causes and conditions of the June event. In October of 2011, DOE denied a loan guarantee for USEC on grounds of technical and financial inadequacy, but Secretary of Energy Steven Chu then proposed a federally funded bailout program through congressional appropriations. The House of Representatives is expected to vote on the 2013 Energy and Water Appropriations bill, including a USEC bailout provision, later today or tomorrow.

The draft Independent Engineer's Interim June-11, 2011 Incident Evaluation Report of July, 2011, was provided to me by a reliable source on condition that the source remain anonymous, in order that the report be made public and come to the attention of government investigators, as a matter of public safety. 

 A prefiguration of USEC's centrifuge operation?

Cartoon by the original Reuben Goldberg

In April of 2012 I was informed by representatives of the NRC Region 2 office, which was also investigating the 2011 USEC incident, that NRC had been unsuccessful in obtaining a copy of the Parsons report from DOE, despite requesting it, since NRC learned of the report in January of 2012. In that conversation, I offered to provide NRC a copy of the report which DOE had refused to provide. 

One business day later, apparently in response to the news that I had offered to give the report to NRC, NRC succeeded in obtaining a copy from DOE. That copy, however, was a “final draft,” which, based on a selected passage read aloud by NRC officials at a public meeting in Piketon in April, appears to have been whitewashed, with damaging statements of the July draft altered or removed. According to NRC, neither DOE nor NRC will release the final report to the public, because “it is not a public document,” despite the fact that, also according to NRC, the report is free of any classified material, prepared with the expectation of public release.

That DOE is withholding crucial unclassified documents about the USEC project from the public and from other government agencies, while simultaneously asking Congress to make appropriations in support of USEC's project, is an enormous contradiction and a challenge to the integrity of the American system of governance.

More detailed analysis of the Parsons report will be forthcoming on this blog, with only some preliminary comments sufficing for now.

The issue of financial incapacity is a critical one, as USEC sinks deeper into corporate crisis, closer to looming debt deadlines, its market capitalization plunging toward the abyss. The Parsons report, referring to an earlier Parsons study of USEC done in connection to the loan guarantee review in early 2011, states on page x-iii:

The recent IER [Independent Engineering Report] noted that USEC ...had financial considerations judged as "very significant risk."

If USEC was judged as a "very significant risk" because of financial inadequacy in early 2011, its condition in mid-2012 would have to be characterized as casket-case.

One critical fact mentioned in the Parsons report of which the NRC inspection team was not made aware is that USEC centrifuges had crashed at least twice in testing before the incident of 6-11-11, which now joins 9-11-01 and 3-11-11 (Fukushima) in the pantheon of disaster numerology. And the breach of 6-11-11 also had a precursor in another breach of an AC-100 centrifuge that occurred in 1977 as part of the Gas Centrifuge Enrichment Plant program, precursor to ACP.  On page XX-ii of Parsons it states:

The incident was unlike the previous machine crashes which were investigated by the IE [Independent Engineer] at K-1600 in February and March of this year [2011].

Who knew there had been prior USEC centrifuge crashes? Certainly not the NRC, which licenses the facility and certifies its safety. Certainly not Ohioans asked to provide political booster support for USEC. Certainly not Congress, asked to appropriate funds based on undocumented assertions of the centrifuge project's “viability.”

Mention of the K-1600 facility is also a revelation. K-1600 is a federal facility, not in Ohio, but in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, part of the old K-25 gaseous diffusion plant site. USEC pays no leasing fee for that facility, as it pays no leasing fee at Piketon. Rather, K-1600 is leased by the U.S. Air Force as a “seismic testing laboratory,” which might be considered rather odd until the obvious interest of the Air Force in subjecting uranium centrifuges to seismic shock tests is recognized. Since the Parsons report discloses that K-1600 is USEC's principal R&D testing facility in Oak Ridge, shut down since June 11, 2011, along with the Piketon Lead Cascade, we might infer that this is the key information that involved parties do not want disclosed to the public.

Such information suggests that the entire USEC operation, with its mysterious support from the clandestine National Nuclear Security Administration, is actually oriented toward providing useful information to the Department of Defense, explaining mystery contract payments to USEC that were not identified as part of any overt program. And that would explain why the clear commercial non-viability of the American Centrifuge Plant has had no effect on levels of DOE and NNSA support. ACP is simply not a civilian project, and it will have no commercial result. It is, at this point, just a military R&D project, located principally in Oak Ridge, threatened with exposure if USEC were to enter bankruptcy and liquidation.

Though the Parsons report is critical of USEC's corporate culture, management practices, worker training, financial capabilities, and overall technological competence, the report represents a lower-limit estimation of the severity of problems at USEC. Workers charged with assembly and maintenance of the centrifuges at Piketon have told this writer that they were instructed by USEC managers to not disclose certain key facts about the operation and the incident to the Parsons investigators.

A Crash Course in Duplicity

As I reported at Ecowatch.org in November, 2011, the 6-11-11 accident was immediately hushed up. Though categorized as a "24-hour event" for required regulatory notification, USEC delayed filing a written report with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) until July 1, with public notice further delayed by the July 4 holiday. The report that was filed oddly included no mention of the most salient aspect of the occurrence -- the centrifuge crashes -- and was limited to a description of safety violations in peripheral parts of the facility.

By waiting nineteen days, USEC Inc. avoided adverse publicity and impact to its stock price, before the critical deadline of June 30, a date USEC itself had established by ultimatum as the date by which the Department of Energy had to award a conditional commitment on a $2 billion federal loan guarantee, or risk project termination. (Despite the threat, eleven months have now passed without a loan guarantee or a federal bailout and the project has yet to be terminated.)

U.S. Senator from Ohio Rob Portman, acting as a mouthpiece for USEC, downplayed the 6-11 accident as "a hiccup" -- a PR term invented by USEC for the occasion, when the story broke:

The hiccup at the plant a few weeks ago, I think that has been addressed…We believe all the technology questions about the refinements have been answered. Those should be behind us now.

Portman made that comment to area newspapers in the context of his continued lobbying for a loan guarantee for USEC, even as the Parsons team was conducting its investigation, which would result in the condemnatory report , submitted later that month but never released to the public by DOE or USEC.

Portman is now touted as a likely Romney running-mate. Romney, as we know, terrified the family dog into gastrointestinal distress by driving with the pooch on the roof of the car. Portman isn't like that. He'd scare us shitless, by throwing all of us under the bus.

The Nine Lies of USEC Inc.

by Geoffrey Sea

Of late it's been said often that USEC Inc. has nine lives. The US Department of Energy repeatedly saves the allegedly-private company with some late-breaking, exorbitant,  extortion-satisfying bailout announcement, no matter how disastrous are USEC's management decisions, no matter how severe its corporate calamities, how impending the doom, or how terrible the prospects for government and investor benefit. I have raised the question of whether USEC is "too rigged to fail." USEC says the letters of its name don't stand for anything anymore, but they do. The letters stand for: Undermine the Security and Economy of the Country, Incorporated.

But the purveyors of perpetual vitality for this enterprise have it wrong, because the last-minute salvation scam is inherently non-sustainable. USEC may be staggering on, with artificial life support from quasi-legal or explicitly illegal diversions of federal funds and material, but it's a walking dead man, The Paducah monstrosity cannot breathe beyond some undetermined number of months, at most. The nonsense “American Centrifuge” is as ready to crumble as a Caribbean sand castle in hurricane season. Nearly a quarter of USEC common shareholders are short-sellers betting on near-term misfortune. And the company's creditors are crying uncle more than they are counting on Uncle Sam. On Friday, June 1, USEC tried to put a happy face on a credit-facility extension of only fifteen days. Beyond that, the company's kneecaps are in extraordinary jeopardy.

I suggest there has been some collective typographical error. USEC is not the company of nine lives, but the company of nine lies. These lies are now employed to deceive Congress into supporting a bailout for the company expressly against national interests. So let's unpack:

Lie 1: USEC's problems can be blamed on lack of sufficient government support and unfulfilled political promises to the company, or on a need for emergency federal intervention in the company's projects.

Truth: In fact, the U.S. government has supported USEC with unaccounted BILLIONS of dollars since the company's privatization in 1998 through multiple gifts of uranium, enormous subsidies including free use of government-owned facilities and technology, liability waivers, and no-bid contracts designed to “compensate” USEC with cash in lieu of loan guarantees for which USEC never came close to qualifying. No politician or public official ever promised USEC a federal loan guarantee, and if they did, that act would have been expressly illegal and unethical. Any proposal to renationalize USEC or to take over or fully subsidize USEC in whole or in part would run directly counter to the USEC Privatization Act, which would need to be amended or repealed by Congress to make such federal involvement in USEC legal. The Privatization Act, in letter and intent, created USEC as a freestanding company, the commercial ventures of which should live or die on the basis of independent business decisions, without political interference. Offering bailout in bad times, with no commensurate payback to the government foreseen or foreseeable would be a supreme violation of the public trust.

Lie 2: USEC leases its facilities from the government and pays for the government services it receives.

Truth: USEC's single “lease” which covers its use of land and facilities at both the Piketon, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky, sites, is a misnomer. It is not a lease in any ordinary sense as USEC is not required to make payments to the government to retain control of the sites, the arrangement has no term or expiration, and there is no provision in the document for termination by the government under any circumstance. In short, the so-called lease represents a government giveaway to a private company, its “negotiation” was bad public policy, and the constitutionality of the arrangement is highly suspect.

Lie 3: The “American Centrifuge Plant” employes “advanced” or state-of-the-art technology that has tremendous efficiency advantages, and may yet be proven viable.

Truth: The ACP-100 machines employed by USEC in “the American Centrifuge Plant” project were developed by the U.S. Department of Energy in the 1970s, and were shelved between 1985 and 2002. There is no evidence in the public domain that the technology has been significantly improved since the 1970s. Indeed, two analyses of the technology's viability by DOE in connection with review of USEC's loan guarantee application resulted in the denial of that application twice, in part on grounds of technical inadequacy. USEC's intentional failure to complete a demonstration of the technology, even though USEC was contractually committed to do so in 2005, strongly suggests that the technology is not technologically viable. During the decades that this centrifuge technology has languished without significant development, competing technologies deployed by other domestic and foreign companies have leaped ahead with new generations of centrifuges and laser-based isotope separation methods. The latter represents tremendous efficiency advantages over any hypothetical USEC centrifuge plant.

Lie 4: The “American Centrifuge Plant” is “American” or “indigenous” in some way that competing domestic enrichment projects are not.

Truth: By definition in U.S. law and regulatory practice, all production plants located on U.S. soil are “domestic,” which makes the URENCO plant in New Mexico, the AREVA project in Idaho, and the GE-Hitachi project in North Carolina all “domestic.” USEC's project employs some technology of U.S. origin, but it also employs technologies of foreign origin, a fact that has been attested by the National Nuclear Security Administration. Some of USEC's competitors are owned by foreign companies, but USEC has also sold partial ownership shares to foreign-owned companies, notably  Toshiba, a USEC strategic investor. Indeed, USEC imports more than half of its product from Russia and has strategically partnered with Tenex of Russia to continue that relationship, making USEC far less “indigenous” than its domestic rivals. USEC has even agreed to support construction of a Tenex enrichment plant on U.S. soil, obviously intended to transition “the American Centrifuge Plant” into a “Russo-Japanese Centrifuge Plant” or something of the sort. No cogent argument has been made for why this venture merits special support by the U.S. government.

Lie 5: The “American Centrifuge Plant” serves some U.S. national security purpose related to production of uranium or nuclear nonproliferation.

Truth: The proferred “national security” rationales for ACP are all demonstrably fallacious. The U.S. will not need a new supply of Highly-Enriched Uranium for between fifty and a hundred years, precisely because USEC was already paid to produce an enormous stockpile of that material in the 1990s at Piketon. TVA does not need a dedicated source of Low-Enriched Uranium for its tritium production reactors, precisely because TVA has now contracted to obtain a stockpile of that material from reenrichment at USEC's Paducah plant. If other supplies for TVA are needed, that can be most cheaply done by down-blending the government's HEU stockpile. The U.S. government has disclosed no role for USEC in assisting nonproliferation efforts, and covert projects to achieve “nonproliferation” by attacking the centrifuge programs of foreign countries are properly funded and conducted by the military, if needed. Confusing covert military programs with allegedly civilian commercial projects actually undermines national security, especially by making any involved site a legitimate military target for foreign countries.

Lie 6: The “Research, Development and Demonstration” project will prove the viability of ACP technology and serve as a step to completion of a commercial-scale “American Centrifuge Plant.”

Truth: In October of 2011, Secretary Chu proposed a two-year RD&D project, to serve as a bridge to a commercial-scale ACP. The timing was critical because USEC's sweetheart agreement to sell Russian weapons uranium expires at the end of 2013, and USEC has a $530 million debt to bondholders due in 2014, with no business plan for repaying that debt. Even if it were possible to complete a two-year RD&D program, it would not be possible to finance and build a commercial plant before USEC's big projected profit losses and debt payment deadlines. But Chu's schedule was dependent on near-immediate funding by Congress, and that funding did not materialize. No actual RD&D program has yet started, and if Congress appropriates funding for 2013, that funding will not be available until October 2012, at the earliest, meaning that the first year of the proposed program will have passed without progress. Since the plan was for USEC to pay 80% of RD&D costs in the second year, if 2013 is considered the second year, then a large federal contribution won't be needed – it's USEC's turn to pay. All of this is nonsense, of course. It's become obvious that neither DOE nor USEC intend to use appropriated funds for any real RD&D program. Rather, they cobbled together a proposed RD&D program as a rationale to obtain congressional appropriations that could then be utilized as a general corporate bailout fund for USEC – paying the company's general debts and expenses. If a real RD&D were warranted, USEC would have attracted private investment to complete it long ago.

Lie 7: The “Research, Development and Demonstration Project” for which congressional funding is sought is the same as, or is a part of “the American Centrifuge Plant."

Truth: Legislative language drafted in large part by the Department of Energy refers to a “Research, Development and Demonstration Project” on “uranium enrichment technology” for “national security” purposes, without explicit mention of USEC, ACP, or any geographic site. USEC, and its agents in Congress have characterized this as “the American Centrifuge RD&D project,” implying that appropriated funds will necessarily go to USEC's project in Ohio, but that is far from clear. USEC may want to lay claim to any appropriated funds, but DOE may be anticipating USEC's collapse and may intend the RD&D program to retain certain overt or covert aspects of the former ACP project under a new guise and operated by other companies. RD&D has clearly changed substantially since Chu proposed it in October of 2011, but DOE has intentionally obscured what those changes are, or how or where it intends to implement the program. Congress would essentially be appropriating funds for a black-box program for which at least three different characterizations have been made. Would the money go to build 120 centrifuge machines at Piketon, as Ohio politicians claim? Or would it go to pay the debts and expenses of USEC Inc. of Bethesda, MD., as the company's investors and creditors expect? Or would it go to pay for an ACP replacement project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, run by Babcock & Wilcox, as the DOE rumors and internal agency motives would have it? Members of Congress asked to vote on the appropriation would presumably like to know.

 U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, running for 2012 reelection 
on the ACP Spin-Counterspin platform

Lie 8: The “American Centrifuge Plant” will generate 4,000 jobs in Ohio and another 4,000 jobs in other states.

Truth: USEC has never provided a shred of evidence that its job numbers for a commercial-scale ACP weren't just cooked up by a PR hack at the company's Bethesda headquarters. Indeed, an internal memo from the Department of Energy in 2009 showed that USEC's jobs numbers evolved in a seemingly arbitrary way, the projection increasing over time as requests for government assistance intensified. When USEC was seeking private investment on the argument of efficiency of operations, its jobs estimates were significantly smaller. Moreover, Ohio politicians have magnified the chicanery by suggesting that the proposed miniscule RD&D project will generate all of the 4,000 Ohio jobs, promised but never documented to come from a full-scale commercial ACP plant. In reality, USEC's continued non-productive occupation of the Piketon site prevents cleanup and alternative development of that site, having a profound negative impact on employment in the area surrounding Pike County, which continues to have the highest unemployment rate of Ohio's 88 counties.

Lie 9: The “American Centrifuge Plant” is good for Ohioans, so politicians and political parties who want to win in Ohio should support it.

Truth: The “American Centrifuge Plant” has been a disaster for Ohioans and represents an ongoing catastrophe for the community. The corruption scandal that is ACP will attach itself to any politician who touches it. Formal termination of ACP would have happened long ago, if the bizarre USEC “lease” had contained a termination clause, and if USEC had to pay to maintain its titular presence and actual control of the site. But under the numerous sweetheart arrangements that were accorded if not authored by Ohio politicians, USEC can sit there, doing nothing, employing virtually no one, forever, or until Americans elect a government with some gumption, whichever comes first. Even more outrageously, USEC's cleanup and decommissioning obligation does not kick in until ACP is formally terminated, meaning that USEC has a tremendous financial incentive to “demobilize” but never “terminate” the project. Thus USEC can potentially delay cleanup and decommissioning until after the company is beyond reach in liquidation, at which point its over-compensated officers will have moved on to those great beyonds where U.S. tax laws and extradition treaties can't reach them. Call it the centrifuge runaround, the only technical demonstration of USEC's spin capabilities that U.S. taxpayers will ever see. Memo to Romney running-mate vetting-process personnel: The assumption that Appalachian Ohioans are too stupid to know a scam or a lying politician when they see one is both highly offensive and historically proven wrong.