Almost a third of the nuclear power plants in Europe depend on Russia etcand in particular by the state-owned company Rosatom against which the EU has not imposed financial sanctions due to its important position regarding the supply of enriched uranium. This is pointed out by Teva Meyer, a researcher at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (Iris) and an expert in the geopolitics of nuclear energy.

As he notes in La Tribune newspaper, despite Europe’s shift to liquefied natural gas (LNG), getting rid of Russia’s strategic weight on European nuclear power will take a long time, says Meyer. At the same time, he points out that even if the European companies Orano and Urenco increase their capacity, this will not be enough, since Rosatom has a monopoly on the manufacture of nuclear fuel intended for a fleet of Russian-designed reactors, which are being developed in central Europe.

In addition, as they notey, dependence on Moscow does not stop only at the enrichment of natural uranium but also in the fuel sector, where Europe cannot turn enriched uranium into uranium oxide to form small cylinders called pellets, which are the final “fuel” for power plants, as it is designed and balanced for the characteristics of a specific power plant and cannot be used to power an installation of another model.