Maybe Southern Company and Georgia Power should listen to Urenco’s owners: the nuclear industry is flatlining after Fukushima.

Stanley Reed wrote for Dealbook.Nytimes.com 27 May 2013, Powerhouse of the Uranium Enrichment Industry Seeks an Exit,

The company that operates this uranium enrichment center, Urenco, is the world leader in the field. It is also plumply profitable. So why are its owners eager to sell it?

The answer, as with many things involving nuclear power, is a combination of economics, geopolitics and the Promethean prospect of an energy source that is as potentially green and abundant as deadly dangerous….

Analysts estimate Urenco’s market value at about 10 billion euros. For all that momentum, though, the company is at a crossroads. Growth may flatten in the next couple of years, executives say, mainly because Japan — a major user of nuclear power until the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster — has shut down its reactors, taking about 10 percent of the world’s nuclear energy generating capacity offline. And the Japanese have stockpiled substantial amounts of fuel for the day, if ever, that those reactors go back into operation.

Who wants out? The British government, the German utilities E.On and RWE, and the Dutch government. That’s all of the owners.

Who might buy? Areva (remember that French war in Mali which was partly about uranium mining in Niger?), Toshiba, or maybe Abu Dhabi or India or China.

Fortunately, Southern Company probably can’t afford to buy Urenco, already being overstretched with Kemper Coal and the ever-later and more-costly nukes at Plant Vogtle.

-jsq

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