Ohio Valley Electric Corporation

Ohio Valley Electric Corporation (OVEC), through its wholly owned subsidiary, Indiana-Kentucky Electric Corporation, provides electric power to the uranium enrichment facilities in Portsmouth, Ohio. It owns two generating stations located in Ohio and Indiana. The company was founded in 1952 and is based in Piketon, Ohio.

OVEC is jointly owned by American Electric Power (43.5%), FirstEnergy (20.5%), Buckeye Power (9.0%), Duke Energy (9.0%), E.ON (8.1%), DPL (4.9%), Allegheny Energy (3.5%), and Vectren (1.5%).

Power portfolio
Out of its total 2,389 MW of electric generating capacity in 2005 (0.22% of the U.S. total), OVEC produced 100% from coal. OVEC owns two power plants, one in Indiana and one in Ohio.

Existing coal-fired power plants
OVEC owned 11 coal-fired generating stations in 2005, with 2,389 MW of capacity. Here is a list of OVEC's coal power plants:

In 2006, OVEC's 2 coal-fired power plants emitted 15.3 million tons of CO2 and 133,000 tons of SO2 (0.88% of all U.S. SO2 emissions).

Kyger Creek ranked 29th on list of most polluting power plants in terms of coal waste
In January 2009, Sue Sturgis of the Institute of Southern Studies compiled a list of the 100 most polluting coal plants in the United States in terms of coal combustion waste (CCW) stored in surface impoundments like the one involved in the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash spill. The data came from the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) for 2006, the most recent year available.

Kyger Creek Station ranked number 29 on the list, with 1,356,475 pounds of coal combustion waste released to surface impoundments in 2006.

EPA "high hazard" dam
In November 2011, the EPA released a new set of data that revealed 181 “significant” hazard dams in 18 states - more than three times the 60 significant-hazard ponds listed in the original database released in 2009. In addition to the increase in the number of significant hazard-rated ponds, eight previously unrated coal ash ponds were found to be high hazard ponds in information released by the EPA earlier in 2011. Because of the switch in ratings after the EPA inspections, the total number of high hazard ponds has stayed roughly the same at a total of 47 ponds nationwide.

According to the National Inventory of Dams (NID) criteria, “high” hazard coal ash ponds are categorized as such because their failure will likely cause loss of human life. Six states that gained high hazard ponds include:
 * Ohio: OVEC's Kyger Creek Station, Gallipolis: 2 high hazard ponds

US DOE awards $2.1 billion contract to OVEC's uranium enrichment facility
The facility OVEC provides power for opened in 1956 to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Its mission switched to producing fuel for use in commercial nuclear power plants in the 1960s. On August 16, 2010, a $2.1 billion, 10-year contract was awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy for environmental cleanup of the former uranium processing plant. A joint venture between Texas-based Fluor Federal Services Inc. and North Carolina-based Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Group Inc. will take over the next phase of the environmental remediation of the government-owned complex that calls for the decontamination and decommissioning of three processing buildings at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon. The contract will involve cleaning up contaminated soil and groundwater.

The stepped-up remediation effort comes as USEC continues to court the energy department for a $2 billion loan guarantee for a proposed $4 billion facility on the campus to continue production of fuel for the nuclear power plants using a centrifuge technology. In the early 1990s, USEC was created as a government corporation in order to restructure the government’s uranium enrichment operation and prepare it for sale to the private sector. Separately, Duke Energy and Areva SA in mid-2009 announced tentative plans for a 1,650-megawatt nuclear power plant on the Piketon campus. That project remains unscheduled pending site review and exploration of potential federal government financial assistance.

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