The Cruas-Meysse nuclear power plant in France. Credit: SOPA Images / Shutterstock Editorial / Profimedia
The non-governmental environmental organization Greenpeace said on Sunday that France is sending reprocessed uranium to Russia for treatment so that it can be reused, despite the Kremlin's war against Ukraine, reports AFP.
Although legal, the trade is “immoral”, Greenpeace claims, as many nations seek to increase sanctions against the Russian government over Moscow's February 2022 invasion.
According to the organization, members of Greenpeace filmed about 10 radioactively labeled containers being loaded onto a cargo ship in the French port of Dunkirk on Saturday.
The Panamanian-registered vessel Mikhail Dudin is regularly used to transport enriched or natural uranium from France to St. Petersburg, Greenpeace claims. However, according to the group, Saturday's shipment was the first of reprocessed uranium it has observed in three years.
“It's not illegal, but it's immoral,” Greenpeace's Pauline Boyer told AFP.
“France should end its contracts with Rosatom, a state-owned company that occupied Ukraine's Zaporozhye nuclear power plant for three years,” she added.
EDF and a subsidiary of Rosatom, a deal of 600 million euros
State-controlled giant Electricité de France (EDF) in 2018 signed a €600 million deal with a Rosatom subsidiary, Tenex, to recycle reprocessed uranium. These operations were not affected by the international sanctions that were introduced due to the war in Ukraine.
Rosatom owns the only facility in the world – at Seversk in Siberia – capable of carrying out key parts of the conversion of reprocessed uranium into enriched reprocessed uranium.
Uranium can be reprocessed so that it can be re-enriched and reused. With uranium prices rising again on international markets, it is increasingly profitable for energy companies to turn to reprocessing spent fuel.
Only about 10 percent of the uranium Russia sends back to France is used at the Cruas nuclear power plant in southern France, the only one in the country that can use reprocessed enriched uranium, according to Greenpeace.
The French energy ministry and EDF did not respond to AFP questions about transport or trade. France ordered EDF to stop trading uranium with Rosatom in 2022, when Greenpeace first revealed the contracts.
In March 2024, France said it was “seriously” looking into building its own conversion facility to produce reprocessed enriched uranium.
