Lea County, N.M., Chosen as Site of $1.2 Billion Uranium Enrichment Plant
28-AUG-03
Byline: Ruth Friedberg
Aug. 28--HOBBS, N.M.--Louisiana Energy Services, a partnership of major nuclear energy companies in the U.S. and Europe, has selected Lea County, N.M., as the site of a $1.2 billion uranium enrichment plant.
Uranium enrichment is a preliminary step in converting nuclear power to electricity, said Marshall Cohen, vice president of communications and government relations for LES.
The plant, to be called the National Enrichment Facility, would be located four to five miles east of Eunice, N.M.
"I think it's good for Lea County and good for the state," said Kathi Bearden, president of the Economic Development Corporation of Lea County and publisher of the Hobbs News-Sun. "We're very pleased and very excited, of course."
LES had been focusing its attention on a site in Hartsville, Tenn., about 45 miles northeast of Nashville, while designating the Lea County site as an alternative.
Bearden said the project has received support from the county, state and congressional delegation. A formal announcement is expected next Tuesday.
Cohen said U.S. senators, congressmen, state and national utility officials would attend the event.
LES's current main office is in Washington, D.C. In the next couple of months, an office will be opened in Lea County, Cohen said. For a while, the company will maintain an office in Albuquerque, and when everything is completed, offices will be located on site as well, he said.
Cohen said LES decided to go with the site near Eunice because things looked more favorable there than in Tennessee in terms of the taxation and business climate and community and state support.
To see more of the Odessa American, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.oaoa.com.
(c) 2003, Odessa American, Texas. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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LES is led [owned] by the European firm Urenco, which is itself a consortium composed of British Nuclear Fuels, Ltd.; the Dutch government; and several German nuclear companies. Urenco operates three similar uranium enrichment plants in
The new version of LES has several different partners, three of them nuclear utilities. These include Illinois-based Exelon, the nation’s (and, combined with its partner British Energy, the world’s) largest nuclear utility; Duke Power, a North Carolina-based nuclear utility; and the Entergy Corporation, which operates nuclear reactors in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, New York and is currently attempting to purchase a reactor in Vermont.
Other LES partners include the Canadian uranium mining and processing firm Cameco and Westinghouse, which, unlike the U.S. media giant that owns CBS, is owned by British Nuclear Fuels and is the world’s largest manufacturer of nuclear reactors.
Duke Power and Entergy Corp. are the only two of these partners involved in the original LES consortium.
The backstory of LES can be found here:
The story of the National Enrichment Facility, the Lea Co., NM facility, can be found here:
http://www.wise-uranium.org/eples.html#NEFThe story reads best if you go to the bottom of the NEF section on wise-uranium and read up. That puts it in chronological order. On the wise-uranium site, the story is told in reverse chronological order (most recent events first). It's not very pretty.
Citizen groups attempt to intervene in the licensing of the facility but are refused entry into the hearings by the NRC. The citizens appeal, but the federal appeals court in the district refuses to hear them.
The US government intervenes in 2004 because one of the members of the consortium has leaked national nuclear secrets but the DOE eventually relents.
The NRC doesn't know how to classify the level of waste the plant will eventually emit but later decides it will be low-level.
It's quite a story...and it's on the wise-uranium site above. Just click on it.
Now Lea County is in the running for the Areva plant that recently rejected Lynchburg, VA as a site.
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OK...now we fast-forward to Friday, March 7, 2008. The Danville Register & Bee and SCC's Gregg Vickrey receive a letter from Phillip Barr, a resident of Lea Co, NM. Mr. Barr urges caution in dealing with the entities that claim to offer protections from unsafe practices involving uranium and briefly describes what's happened in Lea Co. Mr. Barr uses few words but says much.
Here is Mr. Barr's letter:
From: "PHILLIP BARR"
Subject: Letter to the editor about Uranium mining
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 20:34:49 -0700
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