(FORTUNE Magazine) – Few government programs have proved as benighted as the federal operation to enrich uranium for use as nuclear fuel in generating electricity. The effort has cost taxpayers billions and given them little. Now a bill sponsored by Senator Wendell Ford (D-Kentucky) aims to clean up the mess -- by spending more billions. The program has been losing customers to foreign processors. Planners squandered funds on facilities that turned out to be unnecessary. In 1982 FORTUNE dubbed one plant America's costliest government boondoggle; it was canceled in 1985 after expenditures of $2.6 billion. Capacity exceeds demand by a huge margin. The program signed a long-term contract with the Tennessee Valley Authority to spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year for electric power it doesn't need. Senator Ford's bill, which the Senate Energy Committee has overwhelmingly approved, would create a new government-owned enrichment corporation, buy off the TVA with a lump sum payment, impose a penalty on utilities that buy more than 37% of their uranium abroad, and declare the program's debt to the government to be $364 million. That last provision has opponents howling, since the real debt may be as much as $9 billion, according to figures compiled by the General Accounting Office and trumpeted by the National Taxpayer's Union, a lobbying group. If the $9-billion figure is correct, the Ford bill would represent the biggest industrial bailout ever. Some version of the bill stands a good chance of passage, though probably not before next year.