On Thursday, he and his partners in Enivrocare of Utah announced they bought BNG America, a company that manages and cleans up nuclear reactors and highly contaminated sites. On Friday, he promised to make the company even bigger, after combining BNG with Envirocare's landfill for low-level radioactive waste in Tooele County and renaming the burgeoning hot waste company EnergySolutions.
"Our plan will probably be to take it public in the future," said Creamer, president and chief executive officer of the new company. He did not provide a timetable for selling publicly traded stock.
The moves look logical to anyone as optimistic about nuclear power as Creamer is.
New York-based Lindsay, Goldberg & Bessmer teamed up with Utah-based Peterson Partners and Creamer to buy out Envirocare a year ago. But, with a controversial past and the market for big-volume government cleanups shrinking, Envirocare had trouble shifting course, said Creamer.
"I'd love to have another 25-million-cubic-foot year," said Creamer, referring to Envirocare's record year of waste volume in 2005. "But it's not going to happen."
That was part of the company's thinking last year when it bought a company called Scientech D&D, which cleans up and dismantles nuclear facilities. Yet, that new venture bogged down under the old name and an 18-year reputation for working with low-level - rather than higher-level - waste.
Buying BNG America gives EnergySolutions good reason for a new name, "a fresh start," for two companies that otherwise might have been regarded as "the same sheep, new clothes," according to Creamer.
"It's a great opportunity," he said.
EnergySolutions will stick with earlier decisions to give up on a license for Class B&C waste, which is hundreds and sometimes thousands of times hotter than the mile-square Tooele County landfill is licensed to accept. And it has no need to add more waste cells, said Creamer: "I don't need more disposal capacity."
He said Utahns familiar with Envirocare probably won't see any change, although more scientists and engineers may be recruited from outside the state, as well as from Utah State University and the University of Utah. But he noted that some personnel reshuffling already has begun within the company.
"There will be no jobs lost in Utah," Creamer said.
It's likely, however, there will be more growth beyond Utah's borders. BNG had operations where the government's biggest nuclear cleanups are located. Its federal contracts at Hanford, Washington; the Idaho National Laboratory; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Rocky Flats, Colo.; and Savannah River, S.C., have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
In addition, prospects for future contracts in high-level waste look promising.
Decommissioning U.S. power plants could be worth as much as $7 billion a year, with the value projected to grow over the next 30 years, the Times of London estimated. Meanwhile, cleaning up the U.S. nuclear legacy could cost up to $400 billion.
The Times, which put the BNG purchase price at nearly $90 million, reported 19 U.S. Energy Department decommissioning and cleanup contracts are expected to go out this year. EnergySolutions will be well-positioned to land at least some of those because they already are on site at key cleanup locations.
But Creamer also has his eyes on international cleanups. He told The Guardian in Britain that his new company plans to bid on the government-owned British Nuclear Group's nuclear waste reprocessing facility at Sellafield, as well as other cleanup sites in the United Kingdom when they go up for sale.
Managers of the government-owned British Nuclear Fuels, BNG America's former parent company, began pushing for the company's sale last fall. One estimate suggested it could be worth as much as $1 billion to the government's bank accounts.
Creamer reiterated Friday what nuclear waste industry insiders have been saying for months: the Utah company has a big appetite. And he would like to parlay those new acquisitions into a full-spectrum nuclear company, one that can jump into nuclear fuel reprocessing should the U.S. ban on it be lifted. Creamer estimated reprocessing as a $100 billion business over the next 10 to 15 years.
The BNG purchase "was definitely a surprise at first, but a surprise that really fits," said Martin Schneider, editor-in-chief of the Washington, D.C.-based trade newsletter The International Radioactive Exchange.
With a resurgence in nuclear energy, and perhaps the reactor waste recycling in the United States, the new company has more opportunities, he said.
"They can put something together to be a player."
Vanessa Pierce of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah noted that serious health and safety problems have been traced to the Sellafield plant. For instance, British investigators have found plutonium in the teeth of children nearby.
"With the sale, Utah stands to become to nuclear waste disposal what Las Vegas is to gambling," she said.
In the state Capitol on Friday, longtime Envirocare lobbyist Bette Ariel handed out business cards bearing the new EnergySolutions name and logo.
Mike Mower, communications chief for Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., got one.
"This is a private corporate decision," he said. "We applaud businesses that want to build their administrative base in the state."
State regulators have only begun to examine what the name change might mean to EnergySolutions' Utah landfill, said Dianne Nielson, director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.
"There is paperwork to be filed," she said. "Beyond that I haven't heard any more."
fahys@sltrib.com
