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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- EnergySolutions -- the Salt Lake City-based radioactive-waste disposal company known as Envirocare of Utah until last Friday -- has acquired Duratek of Columbia, Md., for $396 million.
Duratek provides disposal services for radioactive material.
EnergySolutions is to buy all outstanding shares of Duratek for $22 a share, a premium of 25.7 percent over the stock's price on Monday, according to Duratek.
The amount includes assumption of Duratek's outstanding debt, the company said Tuesday.
"The acquisition will be funded through a combination of debt to be provided by a group of banks led by Citigroup, cash held by Duratek and EnergySolutions, and equity provided by the owners of EnergySolutions," Duratek said in a news release.
With the deal, EnergySolutions gets what it had unsuccessfully sought for years -- a license to dispose of higher-level wastes -- though not in Utah.
The acquisition, subject to approval by Duratek shareholders and government regulators, also would result in EnergySolutions more than doubling its employees to 2,200 and revenues to around $600 million a year.
EnergySolutions also will have assumed control over one of the nation's other two competing commercial low-level waste repositories.
Duratek's operation at Barnwell, S.C., handles Classes A, B and C radioactive waste, while EnergySolutions' landfill in Utah's west desert only is allowed to handle the lowest-level, Class A waste.
"Certainly, I'm excited about it," said Steve Creamer, EnergySolutions' president and chief executive officer. "It gives us the people and the facilities we need to get the job done."
The other disposal site is at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington and is open to only 11 states.
Along with the name change, Envirocare announced last week that it was acquiring another radioactive-waste company, BNG America.
The acquisitions mean that EnergySolutions can handle a wide range of processes involving radioactive materials. They include cleanups, power-plant maintenance, shipping, packaging, waste minimization, recycling, treatment and disposal.
Creamer said last week that EnergySolutions would continue to grow and probably go public, but it would not mean changes at the Utah disposal site.
Envirocare was founded by Khosrow Semnani in the late 1980s. He sold it last year to a private equity group led by New York City-based Lindsay Goldberg & Bessemer, Peterson Partners and Creamer Investments.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
