MAY HALT HER OWN PROJECTS & MAKE HERSELF AN OUTLAW
Cross-posted at ProgressOhio.org
No snark. Pleistocene Ungreen Mean Jean Schmidt, R-OH, has called a potential halt to virtually all U.S. nuclear power revival plans for reasons related to the genocide in Darfur.
Schmidt charges that any federal aid to AREVA Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of French nuclear giant AREVA, would violate federal law. Schmidt's argument would render illegal at least half a dozen projects that she herself has backed for her district.
The law in question is the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007, which passed the House in a 411-0 vote, on concerns about the Darfur situation. The bipartisan act prohibits federal agencies from doing business with any company with Sudanese holdings. Among its global operations, AREVA owns gold mines in Sudan.
Why the sudden overriding concern for African genocide victims by the nukomaniacal whitebread Republican? Could Jean Schmidt's Christmas Tree possibly be decked with uranium tinsel and corporate shillings?
Find out and take ACTION below the suspense-inducing fold!
Schmidt's Epiphany
Schmidt's anti-nuke Christmas epiphany comes in a "statement" issued by the congresswoman two days before Christmas, and apparently timed to avoid scrutiny or response over the holiday. In other words, Schmidt wanted to control the spin on a characteristically bizarre story that emanates from her own careless action.
About one year ago, attempting to assist her corporate sponsor USEC Inc. in getting a $2 billion federal loan, Schmidt filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the US Department of Energy, asking him to investigate the legality of DOE payments to AREVA under the 2007 Act prohibiting business with companies that have Sudan connections.
AREVA had just submitted a competing application for the same pot of loan funds sought by USEC.
Schmidt probably forgot about the complaint, after USEC and AREVA settled their outstanding issues and formed a partnership in the spring of 2009. But the DOE IG recently informed Schmidt that he was initiating the investigation she had previously requested, thus provoking Schmidt's pre-Christmas patchwork media action.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we pander by attacking AREVA.
Four south Ohio newspapers have now reported Schmidt's statement, doing little but parrot the congress-entity. (Thank God that some of the usual editors were on vacation, or the stories would suffer from even more USEC-inspired distortions.) The Brown County News Democrat broke the "news" on December 24 http://newsdemocrat.com/... , the Chillicothe Gazette followed on December 25 http://www.chillicothegazette.com/... the Portsmouth Daily Times on December 26 http://portsmouth-dailytimes.com/... , and the Pike County News Watchman today, the 27th.
The News Watchman, available online only to subsribers, opens with the most shameless fact distortion, claiming that Schmidt "may have 'struck gold' for USEC Inc." Anything to make the paper's advertising anchor happy.
Neither Schmidt nor the Ohio reporters who have so far covered the story seem to realize that AREVA Inc. is a company pivotal to all plans for a so-called American nuclear renaissance. AREVA is pioneering many of the new reactor designs on which USEC's future market depends, and AREVA is building the very first reactor to break the 35-year coma of the American nuclear industry in Maryland. In addition, AREVA is building one of three new viable U.S. uranium enrichment plants in Idaho, it leads the world in nuclear reprocessing technology including DOE's MOX facility in South Carolina, and it's building the principal U.S. facility to manufacture new reactor components in Virginia.
Who is Chairman of the Board of AREVA Inc., the U.S. subsidiary? None other than G.W. Bush's Secretary of Energy, Spencer Abraham. That's how big AREVA is in corporate American and Republican circles.
According to AREVA Inc.'s website here http://us.areva.com/... the company operates at over 40 U.S. locations and employs close to six thousand American workers directly. AREVA has entered into tight partnerships with Duke Energy, Northrop-Grumman, and USEC Inc., the latter being the hometown company that Schmidt intends to protect from AREVA competition.
Moreover, virtually all of AREVA's U.S. ventures rely on some form of federal support, either through R&D contracts, loans, loan guarantees, purchase agreements, or leases of federal land. If the Department of Energy were to rule Schmidt's IG complaint valid, then hundreds of contracts and leases would be deemed illegal, the partnerships would crumble, and the entire "renaissance" would be thrown back into a dark age. The nuclear option would be rendered dead for decades in the United States.
In a preemptive move against any claim that partners and subsidiaries might escape the legal embargo placed on the AREVA parent company in France, Schmidt appears to have closed off that option:
"In 2007 the President signed into law a bill that I strongly supported making it illegal for the U.S. Government to do business with companies that also do business in Sudan. That law prohibits Areva from doing business with the United States since they also own gold mines in Sudan. Hiding behind a subsidiary is a laughable excuse,"
Mean Jean the Corporate-Criminal Busting Machine! Logically, the same logic applied to subsidiaries also applies to the venture partners whose joint holdings and fortunes are inextricably bound to those of AREVA, and to the subsidiaries formed by those partnerships, like Unistar. According to the Chillicothe Gazette and the Portsmouth Daily Times, Schmidt goes so far as to say she's at work on new legislation to cut off any backdoor escape route for AREVA subsidiaries.
What will this do to Schmidt's popularity and fundraising ability within the AREVA-lovin smootchie-smootch crowd that constitutes the GOP? It doesn't take a Nostradamus to forecast that Schmidt's name will now be, well, Schmidt.
Schmidt's ePIFNI
So why the sudden attack of Naderite conviction for the neanderthal Republican? Certainly any scholarly answer must start with the observation that Schmidt's IQ compares unfavorably to that of a flea beetle. With all due deference to my own member of Congress, Jean can dummy up but she can't dumb down.
Which is to say that the inestimable congresswoman did not foresee the consequences when she filed her complaint. But she can't back down now, especially because she's already been skewered by Independent-Democrat opponent David Krikorian for trying to suppress congressional recognition of the Armenian genocide. (Search tag "Genocide Denial Trial" to get my past diaries on that subject.) Backing away from the Darfur genocide legislation might be a bit much for even her remaining dozen or so stalwart supporters to stomach.
On a purely local level, Schmidt's Darfurian law-enforcement initiative would render illegal at least six projects in OH-02 that she herself has championed. She is still on record as supporting most or all of them. The projects are:
- In 2006, Schmidt backed a new company named ePIFNI, pronounced "epiphany," the Piketon Initiative for Nuclear Independence. ePIFNI's first action was to organize a tour for Ohio officials to AREVA's nuclear reprocessing center at Cap de la Hague in France, presumably paid for by AREVA. The public result of the trip was a report that "the cows look happy" (I swear), but secretly ePIFNI submitted a proposal to DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management for construction of a spent fuel storage facility at Piketon, Ohio, based on AREVA engineering guidance. This was the plan, revealed by whistleblowers, for which Schmidt got zinged in the 2006 campaign. Governor Ted Strickland, rumored to be seeking reelection as a Democrat, also provided two letters of support to ePIFNI.
- In 2007, after Congress passed the Sudan Divestment Act, ePIFNI received $674,000 from DOE to "study" the Piketon site as part of the ill-fated Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program. 52% or $350,000 of that was paid to AREVA, though AREVA produced no discernable work product. It appears that the money was illegally diverted to reimburse AREVA for the prior Ohio junket to France. Strickland and Schmidt both supported this misadventure. AREVA also collected a substantial portion of the GNEP "study" funding that went to ten other selected sites.
- Also in 2007, with GNEP and the waste storage schemes fading, Ted Strickland and Jean Schmidt began direct negotiations with AREVA for the location of a new centrifuge uranium enrichment plant at or near the Piketon site. At this point, Schmidt already had to know that any deal with AREVA would be illegal. Ultimately, AREVA rejected Piketon and chose a location in Idaho, which Schmidt appears to not recognize as part of the United States (she now repeatedly says that money should be preferentially given to Ohio over Idaho projects in order to "protect American workers.")
- In the spring of 2009, Schmidt's corporate sponsor and Piketon site operator USEC Inc., formerly an AREVA competitor, reached a private settlement with AREVA that converted the former litigious rivalry into a partnership. Under terms of the settlement, AREVA agreed to purchase a large amount of enriched uranium from USEC in the short-run, apparently in exchange for future access to USEC utility customers after USEC departs the enrichment business. (USEC plans to shut down its Paducah plant in 2012, and it loses its Russian uranium supply in 2013.) Under this agreement, federal payments to USEC undeniably go to aid AREVA. If USEC's "American Centrifuge Plant" were hypothetically to operate, much of its product would go to AREVA directly and to fuel AREVA-model reactors.
- The fruits of the USEC-AREVA partnership became apparent in June of 2009, when USEC and AREVA, along with Duke, Unistar and the former ePIFNI partner SODI, held a joint extravaganza at Piketon to announce they would build a new nuclear reactor of AREVA design on-site. This would be "green energy" it was announced, because USEC's new centrifuge plant would produce the uranium utilized in the reactor next door (wrongly implying that the uranium wouldn't need to leave the site for fabrication, and USEC had some mechanism for financing its plant). The powerful CEO of AREVA, Anne Lauvergeon, flew in from France. And who was on stage to hawk the deal for the bipartisan asses of the Ohio political classes? None other than Governor Strickland and Congresswoman Schmidt, neither of whom mentioned that any deal with AREVA at a federal site would violate the Sudan Divestment Act. Did Jean pull Anne aside to complain about the AREVA gold mines in Sudan? Is the moon made of Camembert? (I acknowledge that the phrase "bipartisan asses" is a rear-end redundancy.) http://www.portsmouth-dailytimes.com...
- During all this prurient Piketon pandering, none of which has resulted in a single local production job, the real work has been going on in cleanup of the old gaseous duffusion plant at Piketon, which closed in 2001. That work has been championed by Senator Sherrod Brown. The Obama DOE has determined that it would be a conflict of interest for USEC to serve as general contractor on the principal Decontamination and Decommissioning (D&D) job that lies ahead. That leaves AREVA as the major potential bidder on the project. Schmidt's "Darfur" initiative may aim in part at knocking AREVA out, perhaps to force a review of the USEC exclusion decision. More likely, it just puts the whole D&D project in jeopardy, as contractor intrigues and corruption have plagued the Piketon site.
The Un-American Centrifuge Plant
None of the Christmas-time newspaper articles reveals the date when Schmidt filed her IG complaint. Therein lies the real solution to the mystery.
Logically, the filing had to occur sometime between October 2008 and April 2009. The former date followed AREVA's surprise filing of an application for a federal loan guarantee to support construction of its Eagle Rock Enrichment Plant in Idaho. That application caught all USEC supporters by surprise.
Schmidt's congressional mentor, Energy Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman David Hobson of OH-07 (now retired), had specifically arranged the enrichment loan program to ensure that USEC was the only company that could qualify, and that the $2 billion available in the fund was only enough to cover USEC's project costs, with none left for competitors.
AREVA's loan application in the fall of 2008 completely knocked USEC's project out of potential contention, because USEC required full funding in order to qualify at all. Obviously it was that dilemma that spurred Jean Schmidt's IG complaint, on behalf of her corporate sponsor.
But then Mean Jean apparently forgot that she had filed the complaint, because by June of 2009, she was sharing a USEC stage with AREVA's Anne Lauvergeon. All one big happy gold-mining gold-digging nuclear family, n'est pas?
Plus ca change, plus la meme chose, as they say.
By the end of July, the jig was up for USEC. Then, the Department of Energy announced that USEC's application for a $2 billion loan was denied, citing "technical, financial and regulatory issues." That's three black marks out of the three criteria in consideration.
Ted One-Term Strickland then intervened, not to save USEC but to save his reelection chances. He negotiated a six-month period after which USEC could reapply, the timing determined by Strickland's own need to have a positive loan decision announced before the 2010 election. But Strickland failed to confirm with USEC that the six-month timeframe was even feasible. (USEC, by its own report, only has ten centrifuges installed since project startup in 2003. Over the same time period, Iran installed at least four thousand.)
Any smidgeon of hope for USEC disappeared completely one week before Christmas, when Moody's downgraded USEC stock and default risk to "junk grade." http://www.google.com/... The spin from USEC was priceless. (If only USEC could spin a centrifuge the way they do the news.) USEC's Elizabeth Stuckle told Ohio papers that "'junk grade' is only a colloquial term."
Well I have news for you, Ms. Stuckle. "Big frickin' boondoggle that's a pox on the Ohio landscape and all American taxpayers" is also a colloquial term. Pardon my French.
It's finally time for some frankness about USEC's Un-American Centrifuge Plant.
You may recall that Jean Schmidt achieved some notoriety for backing the scheme to send all the spent nuclear fuel intended for Yucca Mountain, NV, instead to "interim" storage at the federal reservation near Piketon, at the eastern end of Schmidt's district. (Background: I broke that story in the Pike County News Watchman.)
Unreported by mainstream media at the time, the Ohio nuclear waste dumping plan was intended to bail out USEC Inc., the privatized former government corporation that controls the Piketon site. As a requirement of the 1996 USEC Privatization Act, USEC had announced an "advanced" technology centrifuge enrichment plant for Piketon, ballyhooed by the likes of Ted Strickland and Rob Portman (now governor and Senate candidates respectively) in January of 2004.
Like I said, USEC's "American Centrifuge Plant" met a statutory requirement. But USEC never had a commercially viable technology for the project, which became increasingly apparent after 2005, as USEC repeatedly missed demonstration deadlines. Competitors in the enrichment business, including AREVA, URENCO, GE-Hitachi and the Revolutionary Republic of Iran, then swooped in to snatch USEC's former market share.
The Schmidt hit the centrifuge, so to speak. USEC was stuck, no reference to Ms. Stuckle. But the company had long anticipated the problem and had taken countervailing steps. Almost immediately after announcing the Un-American Centrifuge project, USEC invested its money instead in the purchase of another company, NAC International. NAC happens to specialize in the storage of spent nuclear fuel.
Translation: USEC never intended to build a centrifuge plant at Piketon -- it had neither the technology nor the financing to do so. Rather, assuming continued Republican dominance in DC, USEC intended to pull a nuclear switcheroo. Claiming hardship caused by all those big bad French, German, Russian and even Iranian competitors, USEC planned to keep its leased federal buildings at Piketon empty, which it has. At the appropriate time, i.e. right about now, USEC would then offer those buildings as spent fuel storage hangars, managed on a lucrative contract by USEC's own subsidiary, NAC International, while sliding its enrichment customers over to its new partner, AREVA Inc. USA.
Every one of you who watched the 2008 presidential debates heard the evidence, though you didn't know what it meant at the time. Not once but twice, John McCain assaulted Barack Obama in the debates with the accusation that Obama "opposes the storage of spent nuclear fuel."
It seemed to make no sense, and Obama reacted with confusion, because Obama had never taken any position on spent fuel storage at all. ("Storage" implies an "interim" arrangement like the Piketon scheme, as opposed to the "disposal" that had been planned for Yucca Mountain.)
You see, McCain had been briefed by Rob Portman and USEC in conjunction with his numerous town hall meetings in southern Ohio. McCain knew that USEC depended for its corporate existence on its ability to convert its enrichment project to spent fuel storage. McCain also knew that USEC is a mainstay for Republican campaign financing in Ohio. To give some idea of how central USEC is in Republican circles, it has retained neocon godfather and known leaker of classified information Richard Perle as "strategic advisor."
McCain also knew that Obama would never allow such a scheme; no stated position from the Obama campaign was necessary.
USEC cannot now pull off such a conversion, because it would be opposed by virtually every politician from Piketon to Washington and all points in between. It also cannot now qualify for any federal loan guarantee. USEC's existence past 2013 is in serious doubt. And that is the reason for significant panic in Ohio Republican leadership circles.
I can almost feel sorry for Jean Schmidt. It's hard to be a corporate shill when your sponsor is a corporate shell. It gets confusing, and that's why Ms. Schmidt is now caught having set a legal train in motion that may result in shutting down the Republican Renaissance that is nuclear-based.
For voters, however, I think this is a clarifying moment. We've got to stop shilly-shallying around with that whole USEC crew and their Schmidty attitude.
AREVAderci, Jean Schmidt: ACTION ITEM
You've got to hand it to Ms. Schmidt. Her diligent researches have uncovered a consequence of statutory law that has gone unenforced. It doesn't matter if you're "pro-nuke" or "anti-nuke." If you care about the people of Darfur, if you want to reproach the government-backed genocide in Sudan, then the terms of the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act must be met without equivocation or exemption.
AREVA owns and operates gold mines in Sudan. Therefore, all U.S. government agencies are prohibited from doing business with AREVA, its subsidiaries and its consortium partners. Existing contracts, purchase orders, and leases involving these entities must be canceled, and funds wrongly dispersed since the Act took effect should be recouped.
Help the people of Darfur by urging the U.S. government to strictly enforce the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act. SUPPORT Jean Schmidt's effort to hold corporate criminals like AREVA and its co-conspirators to the letter of U.S. law.
PLEASE copy and paste the following text to an e-mail to the top Department of Energy officials listed along with their e-mail addresses. Make sure to include your own contact information. Include a link to this diary if you like.
Please also send a cc to SHIPPSONG@aol.com. That way, Southern Ohio Neighbors Group can keep track of the correspondence to DOE. SONG is the public interest watchdog group for the Piketon federal site, and is the group with which I am associated.
Together with diligent public officials like Congresswoman Schmidt, we can end AREVA's depradations in Sudan today!
Gregory Friedman, Inspector General, Gregory.Friedman@hq.doe.gov
Scott Blake Harris, General Counsel, Scott.Harris@hq.doe.gov
Dennis Spurgeon, Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Dennis.Spurgeon@hq.doe.gov
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Ave. SW, Washington DC 20585
Dear Inspector General Friedman, General Counsel Scott Harris, and Assistant Secretary Spurgeon,
I am writing to support the complaint of Congresswoman Jean Schmidt of Ohio. The Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007, which passed with total bipartisan support, must be strictly enforced.
Because AREVA owns gold mines in Sudan, the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractors are barred from conducting any business with AREVA, its subsidiaries, and its consortium partners including USEC Inc., Northrop-Grumman, Duke Energy, and Unistar.
Any existing or prospective contracts, purchase orders, loans, loan guarantees, or leases with these entities must be terminated, and expended funds since the Act went into effect recouped.
Since Congresswoman Schmidt has acknowledged her awareness of the terms of SADA, special scrutiny should be given to the involvement of AREVA and its partners at the Piketon DOE reservation, in Ms. Schmidt's district. An investigation should be opened into the following projects at Piketon since 2007, all of which have been supported by Ms. Schmidt:
- AREVA's receipt of GNEP funding for the Site Characterization study performed by ePIFNI and SODI.
- AREVA's negotiations to build a uranium enrichment plant at Piketon.
- AREVA's participation in the announced USEC-AREVA-DUKE-SODI nuclear reactor project, for which AREVA CEO Anne Lauvergeon visited the Piketon federal site in June, 2009, accompanied by Congresswoman Schmidt.
- AREVA and partners' involvement in cleanup operations at the gaseous diffusion plant at Piketon.
- AREVA's announced settlement and partnership with USEC Inc.
Please keep me informed of your progress on these investigations.
Happy New Year!
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