Stiffed USEC Sues Feds in Nuclear Slugfest

Neighbors for an Ohio Valley Alternative

By Geoffrey Sea

[Read Part I, Part II and Part III of this series]

The United States Enrichment Corporation, the contracting subsidiary of USEC Inc.—the company that now produces nothing—has filed a lawsuit in the Court of Federal Claims seeking $38 million in back-bill payment from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The complaint was filed on May 30 with no publicity, as it reveals that the entities running uranium enrichment projects at the Paducah, KY, and Piketon, OH, federal sites are more antagonists than partners.

The filing came exactly one week after DOE rejected USEC’s $13 million demand for extended payments at Paducah, and one day before USEC ceased enriching uranium at Paducah, making good on a long-time extortion threat. The legal action heralds the end of the “American Centrifuge” project at Piketon and of the uranium enrichment privatization experiment.

For this litigation, USEC has retained McKenna, Long & Aldridge, the leading firm specializing in government contracts that counts all of the top five U.S. defense contractors as clients.

A congressional staffer who has followed USEC dealings closely commented on the news: “It is outrageous.” USEC is displaying more chutzpah than its old mouthpiece, former Congresswoman from Ohio Jean Schmidt, when she called for making flag desecration a felony while draped in a Captain America suit.

Lawyer Enrichment

This official transition from the Atomic Age to the Attorney Age makes obvious what has long been known to industry observers: The USEC Privatization Act of 1996 created a very stormy marriage between USEC and DOE. That marriage led the parties to commit unnatural acts at Paducah and Piketon, but without clear markers of mattress territory, and with irreconcilable differences between governmental and proprietary predilections. Virtual screaming matches between USEC and DOE at closed-door sessions have become something of a scandal unto themselves.

The Privatization Act created USEC as a non-governmental company with unprecedented (and unconstitutional) control over federal assets at two prime industrial production sites. The condition was that USEC shut down the existing antiquated power-hungry facilities and replace them with technology of its own development, free of political interference (insert laugh-track here). But the Privatization Act gave USEC no financial incentive to do the R&D, so the company didn’t, becoming a nagging ward of the bureaucracy from which it was supposed to be liberated. Before he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, Joseph Stiglitz opposed the privatization as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and in an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, he quoted a Republican Senator calling privatized USEC “a threat to national security.”

Now fifteen years into the marriage of inconvenience, the divorce will not be easy or amicable. As I wrote on May 28, the “negotiations” between DOE and USEC, advertized as concerning extended Paducah operations, were in fact about “timing, bill payment and where the political blame for job loss could be cast.”

To keep up public appearances, the squabbling spouses intentionally failed to make preparations or secure the congressional funding for clean plant power-down, because as every divorce lawyer knows, the chief strategic objective is to get the other side to blink. Each party had to show that it was ready to split the child of nuclear safety down the middle, attempting to win spiteful custody of whatever treasure remained. And in the real world of the nuclear complex, there was no King Solomon. They don’t call it a complex for nothing.

Legal considerations did come into play, however. Attempts by USEC to ditch the competitive uranium enrichment business in favor of lucrative no-bid nuclear cleanup contracts were partially thwarted by decisions of the DOE General Counsel that such contracts at either Piketon or Paducah are barred by federal conflict-of-interest rules. The absence of preparations for power-down at Paducah was in part an attempt by USEC to force DOE to waive those rules, since no other company besides USEC would be ready on the spot when power-down occurred. According to reporting in the Lexington Herald-Leader, DOE has now reasserted that conflict-of-interest rules will bar USEC from cleanup at Paducah.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined in September of 2011 that DOE “discretionary” payments and uranium “barters” with USEC, to the tune of some $194 million, were in violation of federal fiscal laws. The $13 million additional gift of uranium from the national stockpile that USEC demanded as payment for a non-performing Paducah extension would have violated these same laws after the illegality had been identified by federal investigators, and would have been the most explicit nullification of the USEC Privatization Act yet on record. That act aimed at closure of the gaseous diffusion plants, and relegated the necessary shutdowns to USEC “business decisions” removed from political influence. Government payment to USEC for alteration of that decision would have defeated the main aim of the statute.

Duking It Out at Paducah

Other federal agencies aren’t done with their scrutiny of the strange transactions between DOE and USEC. Last week, GAO investigators quizzed both DOE and USEC about the apparent absence of plans for clean power-down at Paducah, despite intense negotiations between the parties that have reportedly been underway for more than a year. The results are some of the first public indications of how the Paducah shutdown will transpire, though correct interpretation of the responses relies on our ability to invert the given answers to get at the real truth, the way readers in the former Soviet Union learned to read the party newspaper Pravda.

According to informed sources who wish to remain anonymous, both USEC and DOE told GAO that USEC will return the Paducah plant site to DOE control in parcels gradually, with only the initial phase of “de-leasing” accomplished by the spring or summer of 2014. Similar gradual transfer of the Piketon site delayed cleanup substantially, provided endless opportunities for USEC to extort new payments from DOE, and generated hoax “redevelopment” projects with no more than PR value, such as the phony-baloney media event in 2009 at which USEC claimed it would build a nuclear reactor on a site with no body of cooling water. For these prerogatives, USEC paid no fees of any kind for retention of “leased” facilities, and was subject to no financial penalties for contractual violations. Kind of a sweet “leasing” deal you might want to ask John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to write into legislation on your behalf.

USEC’s exercise of its lease option to retain control of parts of the Piketon or Paducah sites indefinitely and without explanation or payment warrant against the wishful-nonsense proposal now being hawked by Paducah local media.

That proposal, spearheaded by former Paducah manager Jim Thomas, mischaracterizes USEC’s occupancy as DOE contract work for which there should be a successor, when in reality USEC was given control of the site by statute, and it may use that control to knock enrichment competitors out of the box, as it did when USEC slammed the door on competitor AREVA’s interest in building a centrifuge plant at Piketon. (AREVA subsequently went to a private site in Idaho). Briefly put, the Thomas proposal to continue government enrichment at Paducah, even if technically possible, would require repeal of the USEC Privatization Act, which will happen when pigs fly over a national monument honoring Julian Assange.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0zghiHIqMEU%3Frel%3D0

Whistle-blower Joe Carson addresses a meeting of sick Paducah workers and whistle-blowers. Meeting and
video arranged by Commonwealth Environmental Services of Paducah.

DOE and USEC reportedly also told GAO that the reason there is no federal budget line for purging of the diffusion cells at Paducah is that USEC will perform that work itself, before it cedes control of the site. That is utter lunacy. First, that is work barred to USEC under the conflict-of-interest rule. Second, USEC did not perform that service at Piketon, though it had nine years to do it, even though USEC was being paid hundreds of millions of dollars by DOE to do precisely that. 

In fact, that constitutes much of the contract work for which USEC now claims it is owed back over-budget reimbursement in its new lawsuit. And though DOE has not yet commented on the lawsuit, the reason that DOE did not pay those over-charges when billed is that USEC failed to accomplish the assignment. Only now are the cells at Piketon being purged, with many problems encountered, under a $2.2 billion contract to Fluor-B&W.

Moreover, USEC is now in such financial distress, with $500 million each owed to bondholders and to pension obligations, with stock exchange delisting warnings in effect, that the company need not worry about being around long enough to make good on cleanup commitments at Paducah. The company’s total market valuation is down to $43 million. USEC might just as well represent to federal investigators that it will pay the billion-dollar cleanup costs at Paducah, since it’s never paid a penalty for making false promises, and covering for DOE corruption might help settle the current lawsuit and collect on fraudulent bills.

The date at which USEC and DOE represent they will finish the first stage of de-leasing at Paducah—between April and July of 2014—is quite coincidental, as is everything in this business. June of 2014 is the contractual date at which USEC must decide go or no go on the commercial scale version of its “American Centrifuge Project” at Piketon. That would be the project currently estimated as costing a minimum of $5 billion, more than a hundred times USEC’s current market valuation, and for which there is no financing plan that doesn’t read exactly like the investment-fraud plot device of The Producers.

Financially, USEC must ditch the centrifuge project by end of summer in 2014, because on Oct. 1 of that year, assuming it’s still around, half a billion dollars of bond debt becomes due.

In other words, “truther” gibberish aside, the twin towers of USEC operations at Piketon and Paducah are programmed for self-demolition in the summer of 2014, after maximum extraction of illegal payments from the government, but before USEC is required to pay off its investors. USEC will say “no go” on its long-suffering centrifuge runaround, and simultaneously surrender its site control at Paducah, leaving nothing of the company but chemtrails in the sky and in the water and on the ground. That is how the USEC Privatization Act will be repealed, without Congress needing to lift or point a finger. Only all the little people will get screwed.

Today, June 4, the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Energy traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with members of Kentucky’s congressional delegation about the future of the Paducah site. USEC was conspicuously uninvited to those meetings.

The Leaser of Evils

One might wonder who the nutcases were who negotiated the USEC privatization agreement, who authored the screwy single USEC “lease” for Piketon and Paducah that requires no leasing fee and that levies no penalties for any order of malfeasance, who “negotiated” with USEC on behalf of the government when hundreds of millions of dollars were transferred to the private company in exchange for nothing at all (and that was called “barter”).

Well, some of the mid-level people who sat around the negotiating table and witnessed these atrocities also wondered, and some of them did some research, which they shared with me. Turns out it was pretty much all one guy. William A. Murphie, manager of the “Porstmouth/Paducah Project Office” of DOE, was the principal author of the USEC no-fee, no-penalties “lease.” Then he was also the guy who complained that his hands were tied by lease provisions when DOE could not get USEC to relinquish control of the Piketon site for cleanup, and now Murphie is the guy who intentionally failed to secure a budget line to pay for clean power-down at Paducah, on the empty assertion that USEC itself will pay for it.

The Department of Energy should open an interest office in Khabarovsk, as a place to which Murphie can be transferred; on the off chance he is not incarcerated.

Some will claim that the new litigation is routine and nothing but another bump on the road of USEC triumphalism. But consider that USEC has claimed that its fortunes depend entirely on winning a $2 billion federal loan guarantee, an award which has already twice been denied, the application for which has not yet been submitted. Consider that USEC has less than 1 percent of the equity required for the project for which it seeks the loan guarantee.

Now if you were approaching a mortgage lender with less than 1 percent of equity in your portfolio and a record of defaults and explicit threats against the lender, would you, just before you submit your application, try to swing the deal by filing a federal lawsuit against the lender on old claims that have already been denied?