In 2021, the Grohnde nuclear power plant in Lower Saxony on the Weser River was shut down. Now, immediately next to it, the Emmerthal energy cluster is growing with three very large battery storage systems, ground-mounted photovoltaic systems, and a new substation for several 380-kilovolt high-voltage lines.
This is good. Europe is becoming more independent from Russian uranium.
What is also important is decentralization. Russia has massively attacked infrastructure like power plants in Ukraine. For this reason, it is far better to have decentral storage, too.
Most European uranium comes from Canada and Kazakhstan. Russia is still third on the list though, with Australia shooting up for obvious reasons. That was 2024, I hope in 2025 they swapped places.
The uranium itself is sourced from various places, but the necessary uranium processing is largely still done in Russia.
Rosatom pretty much provides all nuclear fuel for old Soviet reactors in Europe. That comes down to about 20% or all EU nuclear power, but only a small percentage of non-soviet conversion services or refined uranium is Russian.
And I think it’s even possible to get western (Westinghouse?) fuel assemblies for society VVER reactors, but you can’t just go “let’s go for brand X this time” on a nuclear reactor…
Regardless, uranium is used is such tiny quantities its pretty much an unnoticeable blip compared to oil and gas imports from russia ever post the Ukraine invasion (the second time that is, since we all opted to ignore the 2014 one…).
The French have been also sourcing most of their uranium processing in Russia and are only slowly diverting to other suppliers.
And the comment wasn’t about the physical volume or the total cost, but rather the structural dependency on uranium processing facilities in Russia. It is true that there are also western processing facilitues, but those are mainly in the US (great alternative /s) and not nearly enough to easily switch to.
They haven’t. There is a dependency, but it’s absolutely not “most”. https://euratom-supply.ec.europa.eu/document/download/4991f977-5fa7-415e-8b7f-04714f01c533_en?filename=202509773_PDFA2A_MJ0125120ENA_002.pdf
Read the euratom report if you want the people who do this for a living to tell you.
They’re not “mainly” in the US, again, see the report. There’s a roughly equal split between US, EU, Canada and Russia. So take factories in the West are mainly NOT in the US. Russian imports for processing services is almost entirely used in fuel assemblies going into ex-soviet plants.
Do you know how many of those ex Soviet plants were in Germany and we’re thus shut down by Germany? I’m sure a quick look on which end of Germany they were built before 1989 will let you answer that question.
The French are sourcing more uranium processing from Russia then any other place. And while they do attempt to reduce that, the processing in the EU fell even more between 2023 and 2024 according to the data you linked (thanks), which clearly shows there is insufficient local capacity to replace the large Russian dependency.
Oh and you are right it is the US and Canada. My bad, but it doesn’t change the fact that it would be just another foreign dependency partially in a country that is weaponizing such dependencies.