Word: urenco
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...government approves, several thousand inhabitants of Eunice, New Mexico are about to get a new corporate citizen: URENCO, the state-owned European consortium whose centrifuge designs have leaked to most of the world's rogue nuclear states. The consortium is revving up to build a new uranium enrichment facility just outside of Eunice not far from the Texas border. But the deal is anything but sealed. The massive project is raising eyebrows among Bush administration officials concerned that a company linked to the spread of nuclear weapons technologies would be operating on U.S. soil...
...past few weeks U.S. regulators have begun processing an application to construct the $1.8 billion plant, which has strong backing from powerful state and federal officials, including Republican Pete Domenici, who is chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. URENCO , an Anglo-Dutch-German consortium, hopes to build in New Mexico as part of Louisiana Energy Services, or LES, an alliance that includes the big American firms Exelon, Duke and Entergy, as well as Cameco, a uranium mining company and Westinghouse, a nuclear fuel manufacturer. If it is built, the plant would produce fuel for nuclear power generation...
...questions in the wake of President Bush's recent call for strict nuclear non-proliferation safeguards, and new revelations from A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani atomic scientist who has admitted passing nuclear design secrets on to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Khan obtained those design secrets, allegedly based on URENCO drawings, after being employed in the 1970's by a subsidiary of a Dutch company that worked closely with URENCO...
...National security sources tell TIME that the New Mexico plant could face closer scrutiny and a more rigorous approval process. "What U.S. technologies might become available to URENCO as a result of its operations here?" asks a senior U.S. national security official. "Given the President's non-proliferation initiative, we will need to go beyond technical aspects of the plant and look at the strategic policy implications." A high-level U.S. nuclear administrator raised nearly identical concerns last year about URENCO/LES plans to build a comparable facility in Tennessee, but those plans were withdrawn by the company...
...only previous attempt by LES to build an enrichment plant involved a multi-year effort in the 1990's targeting a small town in Louisiana. Closed Congressional hearings on Iraqi attempts to acquire nuclear weapons were held not long before, and delved into URENCO's record. Subsequently, powerful Michigan Democrat John Dingell raised concerns that the LES plant in Louisiana might violate provisions governing the movement of classified technology from foreign countries under the federal Atomic Energy Act. That issue was never resolved, but LES gave up attempts to build the Louisiana facility amid controversy over its impact on nearby...