Odessa American January 31, 2005
LES markets uranium enrichment facility
Louisiana Energy Services sending officials to see plant in Netherlands
By Ruth Campbell
Although cities in Eastern New Mexico and West Texas are firmly behind Louisiana Energy Services building a uranium enrichment facility near Eunice, N.M., the company is still marketing the idea to area officials.
The company is paying to send area officials to Almelo, Netherlands, where a similar plant exists.
DeeDee Wallace, business development manager for the Andrews Industrial Foundation, was with a group of 16 area officials on her week-long trip to the Netherlands in December.
LES spokeswoman April Wade said LES has taken "several dozen" officials from Eastern New Mexico and West Texas on trips to the Netherlands facility, owned by LES partner Urenco, since August 2003.
Because the project is complex, "we want to show people what will be built in Lea County. We want to show them the area and what the facility will be like," Wade said.
"It's always helpful to show what's going to be out there and see it's a safe and well kept facility," Wade added.
DeeDee Wallace was impressed by what she saw.
"It was awesome," Wallace said of the Netherland plant. "I had such a curiosity about it having studied as much as I've studied."
Wallace said she's attended Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearings and meetings on the project, seen drawings of the site and visited it. But visiting an actual facility took away her fear of the unknown.
"To actually see what's going to be here, it takes the mystery away," Wallace said.
The Netherlands plant is located close to the city Almelo, water sources and farmland.
"What was so intriguing to me is this technology has been working almost three decades there," she said.
The $1.2 billion LES plant, to be called the National Enrichment Facility, would use gas centrifuge technology.
This is when uranium hexafluoride gas is whirled inside complex rotor assemblies and centrifugal force pushes molecules containing the heavier isotope to the outside, according to the globalsecurity.org Web site.
"For me, the most important piece of the trip was seeing how we can plug people in Andrews into those projects," Wallace said.
© Copyright 2005, Odessa American
