US conglomerate General Electric is seeking permission to build a $1 billion plant for uranium enrichment by laser, a process which has raised proliferation fears, The New York Times said Sunday.
After testing the enrichment process for two years, GE has asked the US government to approve its plans for a massive facility in North Carolina that could produce reactor fuel by the ton, the report said, citing GE officials.
"We are currently optimizing the design," Christopher Monetta, president of Global Laser Enrichment, a subsidiary operated by GE and Japan's Hitachi, said in an interview with the newspaper.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to deliver its decision on whether to issue a commercial license for the complex by next year, the report said.
Uranium enrichment can be used to produce both the fuel for a nuclear reactor and the fissile material for an atomic warhead. New technologies are seen as potentially dangerous as they make it easier to build a bomb.
Monetta said the plant could enrich enough uranium each year to fuel up to 60 large reactors -- in theory, enough to power 42 million homes, or a third of all homes in the United States.
Erm, that's a lot of enriched uranium. More importantly, I doubt GE would go through all this trouble to make this enrichment plant and a technology to do it if they didn't think they'd be able to sell the stuff, and if they weren't expecting a big market for nuclear fuel.
Secondly, I really hope that plant's not going up in my old neck of the woods. It would be a huge target for a number of reasons, not to mention the potential environmental nightmare in case something goes wrong with the technology or containment.
I don't like this one bit.
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