National Enrichment Facility, New Mexico

The National Enrichment Facility, also called Urenco USA, is a new uranium enrichment plant, built recently in the ranch lands near the town of Eunice, in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. The facility is one of only two uranium enrichment plants in the nation, and one of less than a dozen uranium enrichment plants in the world. It is being built by Urenco, a European company that controls around a quarter of the world's uranium enrichment. The facility is similar to the Department of Energy's Gaseous Diffusion plant in Paducah Kentucky, the other uranium enrichment plant in the USA, except that this plant uses the more efficient centrifuge enrichment process. The project ended up here, on the border of Texas, after local opposition ceased attempts to build it in Tennessee and Louisiana. One of the largest single industrial projects built in the USA in the last decade, the $2 billion+ project broke ground in 2008, and was licensed to begin processing feed materials in June, 2010, though most of the site is still under construction. If completed at the intended scale in the next few years, the facility would be capable of producing half the uranium fuel needed for the domestic nuclear power industry.