orth-central New Mexico may appear to have a corner on the state's nuclear industry marketplace, what with the national labs at Los Alamos and Sandia.
      But the southeast New Mexico area around Hobbs, near the Texas state line in Lea County, is making its own claim to isotopic expertise. Already the home of a uranium enrichment operation about to come online from URENCO subsidiary Louisiana Energy Services (LES), the area on March 31 welcomed a $93-million investment from International Isotopes Inc. (INIS), which will build a depleted uranium de-conversion and fluorine extraction processing facility that could employ up to 150 people.
      Being welcomed was a key criterion for INIS, which whittled down its initial site list to finalists in eastern Idaho; Andrews County, Texas; and Lea County.
      "We were actally looking everywhere they're already handling materials of this type," says Steve Laflin, INIS president and CEO. "Washington State, around Honeywell facilities within USEC, back to the [North] Carolina coast where GE is located – we considered all of those regions as possible."
      But "probable" is another story.
      "One key consideration is the political atmosphere in some of those regions," Laflin says, "the history of whether others have succeeded or failed, or encountered a lot of public opposition. Regardless of grading criteria to sites, we will absolutely not go anywhere we would not be welcomed as a new addition to the community."       The plant will occupy approximately 5 percent of a 600-acre (243-hectare) site, with the rest functioning as buffer space, well beyond Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requirements. However, says Laflin, it's important to note that the facility will function more like a chemical plant than a nuclear facility. Because the material the firm is dealing with is depleted uranium, he says, "Most of the security hazards at our facility will be associated with the security requirement of chemicals we'll possess, rather than the radiological consequences."
      Those chemicals include compounds INIS will sell wholesale, which will then be sold for industrial end uses ranging from aluminum and refrigerant manufacturing to the chemical vapor deposition methods used by electronics manufacturers to etch designs on chips or photovoltaic materials.
      A range of specialty gases will be produced using patented processes to extract fluorine from depleted uranium hexafluoride, or DUF6. Those DUF6 "tails" will be coming from uranium enrichment operations currently in various stages of development across the country by such organizations as GE-Hitachi, AREVA, LES and the U.S. Dept of Energy. It may take those plants more than two decades to process existing stockpiles – which means a steady supply of DUF6.
      The LES plant just east of Eunice, to the southwest of Hobbs, was authorized in late February by the NRC to receive its first shipment of uranium hexafluoride, and plans to begin commercial production sometime in 2009.
      Laflin says the material must be de-converted to a chemically stable oxide form for safe disposal. He says his company is the only one ready to serve this niche: "The real advantage for us is we can do more than simply convert it," he says. "We can produce commercial products, and that's because of the patent we hold."
      Some of the plant's equipment and design in New Mexico will come from the assets INIS purchased in 2008 from Sequoyah Fuels Corp., which owned a uranium deconversion facility in Oklahoma that had been idle since 1993.       Laflin would not elaborate on the company's statement at the time of the announcement that "INIS is currently evaluating several paths to raise the capital that will be necessary for the project," including possible agreements with companies involved in enrichment or interested in procuring de-conversion products. The company is also investing $10 million and will hire 20 for a demonstration facility in Idaho, which could start operations as early as mid-2010.
      Laflin praises the collaboration among the city, county and state government agencies with which INIS has conferred in New Mexico. Their partnership may take its most notable shape in educational opportunities, a sweet spot for INIS, which reimburses 100 percent of any higher education for its employees.
      "The University of New Mexico, University of the Southwest and New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs have worked with LES to develop a nuclear technician training program," says Laflin. The junior college received NRC grants for the program in 2007 and 2008. "We looked at that curriculum, and it was so broad and well thought out, we thought it would suit our needs as well, without any modification."