Urenco

URENCO Limited
legal form	Limited
founding	1971
Seat	Stoke Poges , Buckinghamshire ,
management	Stephen Billingham
sales	1.957 billion euros
Branch	Uranium enrichment
Website	www.urenco.com
As of December 31, 2018

The Urenco Group is a British company with headquarters in Marlow ( United Kingdom ). According to information from URENCO Deutschland GmbH, the URENCO Ltd. an "independent, global energy and technology group" and operates plants with centrifuge technology developed in-house in Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain and, since mid-2010, also in the USA. Be it your goal to "safe, cost effective and reliable uranium enrichment for civilian nuclear power plants as part of environmental, social and corporate responsibility to provide" support to their customers, "to meet the global demand for energy and CO ₂ low-carbon energy to produce."

"Urenco" is the acronym for " Ur anium En richment Co mpany".

structure

The group is divided into two business areas:

1. The Urenco technology group produces centrifuge systems. Initially, the centrifuges were only sold to their own enrichment group, but the technology has also been marketed globally for some time. Locations are Almelo , Capenhurst (Borough Cheshire West and Chester ) and Gronau (Westf.) .
2. The Urenco Enrichment Group (UEC) operates the enrichment of uranium using the centrifuge process and the sale of the end product. There are currently three locations in Europe:
   • Capenhurst in Cheshire ,
   • Almelo and
   • Gronau , the only plant in Germany.

In the United States , a plant in Eunice, New Mexico, has been in operation since 2010 .

Company history

Urenco was founded in 1970 with the 'Treaty of Almelo ' between Great Britain , Germany and the Netherlands. As a result, the research of the three countries on centrifuge technology should be combined and used commercially. Great Britain and the Netherlands each hold a third of the shares. The German nuclear power plant operators RWE and E.ON each own a sixth of the shares.

In 2006 Urenco supplied the world market for enriched uranium with a share of 23 percent. With a turnover of almost 900 million euros , a net profit of 209 million euros was reported.

Urenco started with three pilot plants in the three European sites before building the first two commercial plants in Capenhurst (E21) and Almelo (SP3) sites. The first customer deliveries were started in 1976, the plants reached full capacity in 1980 with a total uranium separation work of 460 tons per year. Thanks to the modular structure of the centrifuge technology, the subsequent expansion of production could be easily adapted to the actual supply contracts, as the demand forecasts of the 1970s in the 1980s and 1990s turned out to be completely exaggerated.

The capacity of the Urenco systems was more than 10,000 tons of cutting work per year in 2008 and is to be expanded further.

In June 2010, the plant in Eunice , New Mexico went into operation. Before that, practically only first-generation enrichment plants were in operation or on standby in the USA, particularly one in Paducah , Kentucky, dating from 1954 .

On January 21, 2010, a worker was contaminated in an incident at the Gronau uranium enrichment plant . He was exposed to increased ionizing radiation .

Since 2019 Urenco has enriched uranium (U235) not only to five, but to 19.75%. From 20%, U235 is considered weapon capable. The US Department of Defense expressed a specific interest in the higher enrichment for small mobile reactors in "rapid response scenarios".

criticism

Uranium ore from Namibia

In May 1985 the Namibia Council of the United Nations (UNCN) decided to sue Urenco for breaking a UNCN regulation. According to this ordinance, the extraction of natural resources in Namibia was prohibited under the occupying power of South Africa , but Urenco was accused of having imported uranium ore from the Rössing mine . The case went to court in July 1986, where the Dutch government endorsed Urenco's position that it did not know where the uranium ore was being mined.

Uranium export to Russia

In 2007, the company came under public criticism when a report on the ZDF broadcast Frontal21 reported that the company was bringing depleted UF ₆ to Russia for reprocessing, without worrying about the unsafe conditions there and the associated health risks for Russian workers. Since 1996 and most recently in August 2008, the uranium enrichment waste declared as “valuable material” has been delivered by rail from Gronau to the Siberian Seversk to the local contractual partner Tenex and stored there in steel drums in the open air. According to the company, only 10 to 15 percent came back to Germany in the form of fuel, the rest stayed in Russia, as the television documentary Nightmare Atomic Waste showed.

At the end of July 2019, another special train with 600 tons of uranium hexafluoride destined for Russia was confirmed by the Ministry of Economics, Innovation, Digitization and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Uranium export to Japan

In connection with the Fukushima nuclear disaster , the company made headlines because Urenco has several customers in Japan and has exported enriched uranium to Japan for fuel rod production.

Sponsorship

Urenco Deutschland is involved as a sponsor of the cultural program of the city of Gronau and as the main sponsor of the football teams Vorwärts Epe 1923 e. V. (district league) and Fortuna Gronau 09/54 e. V.

Web links

Commons : Urenco  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Urenco official website
• FAZ.net March 25, 2017: Not a normal industry (comment)

Footnotes

1. ↑ Contact us
2. ^ Board of Directors
3. ↑ Annual Report 2018
4. ^ Company structure
5. ↑ URENCO Deutschland GmbH: Annual financial statements for the business year from 01/01/2018 to 12/31/2018 . ( bundesanzeiger.de [accessed on November 29, 2019]).
6. ↑ Written inquiry - deliveries of uranium and enrichment technologies by the Urenco company to Iran and other countries that want to develop nuclear weapons - E-1360/2003. Retrieved January 8, 2020 . 
7. ↑ Urenco: URENCO USA begins enrichment of nuclear fuel , press release of June 25, 2010
8. ↑ http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/strahlende-renditen-mit-uran;1262514
9. ↑ Maurice Lenders: Uranium Enrichment by Gaseous Centrifuge ( English , PDF) Urenco. Pp. 1-3. May 16, 2001. Accessed on July 22, 2008.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
10. ^ Arjun Makhijani, Lois Chalmers, Brice Smith: Uranium Enrichment ( English , PDF) Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. P. 20f. December 15, 2004. Retrieved March 8, 2017.
11. ↑ spiegel.de January 22, 2010: Incident in Gronauer uranium factory
12. ↑ Press release February 9, 2019: Urenco USA Inc. announces next-step HALEU activities
13. ↑ IPPNW March 5, 2019: Urenco quadruples the degree of uranium enrichment
14. ↑ greenpeace.de ( Memento of the original from November 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
15. ^ Neue Westfälische (Bielefeld): Uranium waste from Gronau ends up in Russia again. Retrieved November 29, 2019 . 
16. ↑ Klaus Wiedau (March 14, 2011): “No more kilograms of uranium to Japan” . In: Westfälische Nachrichten. Accessed March 14, 2011
17. ↑ Urenco Germany: Enriching the future. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on January 19, 2012 ; Retrieved January 22, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.