Idaho firm plans uranium waste plant

BOISE – A tiny eastern Idaho company said Wednesday it plans to build a plant to make useful industrial gases out of waste from commercial uranium enrichment facilities like the one France’s Areva NC Inc. plans to build near Idaho Falls.

The plant proposed by International Isotopes Inc. of Idaho Falls won’t necessarily be in Idaho. To equip it, the company plans to buy used equipment from a defunct Oklahoma site that’s been shuttered since the early 1990s.

International Isotopes said its proposed plant, to employ 50, would turn depleted uranium hexafluoride, or UF6, into more-easily disposable solid waste. In addition, it would extract high-value germanium fluoride gas needed to etch silicon for microelectronics.

The U.S. Department of Energy is building two plants, at Paducah, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio, to handle roughly 450,000 tons of existing waste from uranium enrichment facilities at those locations.

International Isotopes CEO Steve Laflin said his plant, expected to be 15,000 square feet when completed, would target waste from commercial enrichment operations like Areva’s, due to be operational by 2014.

“It fits in with the uranium cycle process,” Laflin said. “We’re able to help companies that are producing UF6 tails to manage inventories. We’re also able to extract a useful product from a deconversion process that would otherwise end up in low-value or no-value products.”

Thirteen-year-old International Isotopes has 30 employees and had sales of just $4.5 million in 2007, including isotopes such as cobalt-60 used in medical treatment of brain tumors and vascular deformities. It already operates a pilot plant in Idaho Falls that produces fluoride gases from depleted uranium and is nearing its first sale, Laflin said.

He didn’t give a cost for the new project, but said federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing could take three years after his company applies in 2009.

International Isotopes said its proposed facility could be located anywhere on transportation routes that would provide easy access to uranium enrichment plants proposed or being built in Idaho, Ohio and New Mexico, and radioactive waste disposal sites such as Hanford and one near Clive, Utah.

“There are lots of good arguments for quite a few locations,” Laflin said. “The other end of the process would ultimately be disposal of this material, and so any location along the corridor between the site of production and the site of final disposal really makes good sense.”

Approximately 90 percent of uranium hexafluoride that enters enrichment facilities to become nuclear reactor fuel re-emerges as depleted uranium. International Isotopes aims to take the depleted uranium hexafluoride and turn it into a solid form, then extract the useful fluoride gas before sending what’s left to a repository, Laflin said.