The next five years will be critical to whether Western allies can wean themselves off their dependence on Russian nuclear company Rosatom, analysts say.
As of 2024, Rosatom commands over 44% of global uranium enrichment capacity and supplies about a quarter of Europe’s needs, according to data from the World Nuclear Association.
The US in 2024 banned Uranium imports from Russia starting in 2028—at the time of the ban, Russia was supplying about 24% of American enrichment needs. A waiver system allows imports under licensed exemptions until the hard ban takes effect.
Enrichment is usually measured in separative work units or SWUs—the work and energy to separate feed material into enriched fuel product and depleted uranium (tails). Rosatom wields over 27 million SWUs. Its closest competitor—the multinational consortium Urenco has over 17 million. France’s Orano has 7.5 million and China’s CNCC has 10 million.
Western companies are trying to make up the difference over the next five years. Urenco plans to add 2.5 million SWUs by 2030 by expanding operations at its Almelo facility in the Netherlands and scaling up production in the US. Orano launched a project to increase its own capacity by 30%.
Yet, much of this new supply had already been bought up by American companies ahead of the full ban, Orano chief executive Nicolas Maes told Financial Times in January. Urenco chief executive Boris Schucht told Financial Times that the consortium needs clarity from politicians and guidance from the market on what to do about its aging fleet of hardware.
The next five years will be defined by a structural mismatch between the urgency of decoupling from Russia and the industrial timelines required to realize it. The period until then represents the most acute phase of Western vulnerability, said Mohammed Shadi, a nuclear expert with the independent Al-Habtoor Research Institute in Egypt.
“From Rosatom's perspective, this transition period represents exactly the strategic window in which to demonstrate indispensability and lock in long-term alignments,” Shadi told Euromaidan Press.
“Moscow's broader playbook—offering integrated packages of reactor construction, state financing, and lifetime fuel supply to developing states—has proven resilient to Western sanctions precisely because it creates century-long infrastructure dependencies that no waiver framework can unwind.”
Cheaper to outsource to Russia
Rosatom gained the upper hand for many reasons. But a major factor was how economically expedient it was to outsource enrichment to Russia compared to investing in capacities at home.
Over the past three decades, uranium enrichment was relatively abundant. Operators took advantage by "underfeeding," which roughly translates to doing more extractive work to get the maximum possible share of fissile material from each input. The result was a substantial reduction in demand for uranium ore.
Russia ran the megatons to megawatts program from 1993 to 2013, repurposing Soviet nuclear warhead uranium into civilian fuel. At its peak, this program supplied half of fuel consumed by American commercial reactors.
At the same time, technology changed. Nuclear enrichment transitioned from gaseous diffusion to gas centrifuges, which brought the energy costs down 50-fold. While it made enrichment much cheaper, “it fundamentally shifted the economic burden from energy prices to upfront capital investments,” Shadi said.
In other words, the new tech favored whoever would invest in centrifuges, then spin them for years. It was cheaper for Western nuclear operators to let Russia make that investment.
Moscow had a huge wealth of equipment from the Soviet Union and it heavily cushions Rosatom from market conditions, giving it a competitive advantage. Geopolitical tensions were lower and the issue of energy security had had yet to rear its head.
“Western enrichers found themselves caught in a structural trap: the one technology that could have preserved their competitiveness required exactly the kind of long-horizon capital commitment that megatons to megawatts pricing made financially untenable,” Shadi said.
When Western diffusion plants began reaching the end of their life cycles and closing, filling that void by building domestic plants was economically unattractive. Urenco retained its capabilities and France opened the Georges Besse II facility in 2011, but these only partly offset the shortfall.
Shifting pressure towards mining
To deal with the recent scarcity, enrichment companies are incentivized to “overfeed”— speeding up production and reducing the separative effort for each load at the cost of leaving higher uranium concentrations in the “tails.”
This will shift pressure upstream towards uranium mining, where Russia also has key advantages. Cost is one factor: as an arm of Russian power, Rosatom doesn’t have to worry about market conditions as much as private Western firms do.
“They have this factor of being isolated, of having buffers that enable them to maintain capacity when purely commercial companies would otherwise end up firing people or doing redundancies,” said Marc DeVore, a military scholar with St. Andrews' School of International Relations.
As well, people in the West generally don’t like to have uranium mines or enrichment operations near their backyards. An autocracy like Russia doesn’t have to deal with this.
“Part of it is regulation and caring about people. It's very unpopular to start a uranium mine in the United States,” DeVore added. “And if you have a uranium mine, you better ensure that every safety measure is fulfilled to the Nth degree.”
This is also true for Europe. For example, when France operated uranium extraction in Niger, revelations of people being exposed to bad conditions led to a political scandal.
“Russians do have an advantage when it comes to being able to supply uranium,” DeVore said. “They just don't give a fuck about people.”
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Technological dependencies
The Rosatom dependencies aren’t just political and economic but also technical, from Hungary’s Paks nuclear reactor depending on Russian fuel to France requiring Rosatom’s services for extracting value from reprocessed uranium.
State power company Electricite de France has up to 35,000 metric tons of spent fuel, whose fissile material has been recovered, but can still save up to 25% of natural uranium resources in the fuel cycle, Shadi said.
However, this fuel cannot be fed into standard enrichment cascades without contaminating the entire facility. Western companies would need to build a bespoke conversion and enrichment plant. For now, the only plant that can reprocess spent fuel at the needed scale is Rosatom's Seversk plant in Siberia. EDF and Orano have continued shipping reprocessed uranium to Seversk under long-term contracts, even after the 2022 invasion.
Russia also holds a near-monopoly on high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which is enriched above 5% but below the 20% weapons-grade threshold, according to Al-Habtoor. HALEU is required for many advanced reactor designs, including small modular reactors (SMRs).
Compact, flexible, and relatively safe, SMRs are an increasingly attractive option to replace coal plants for carbon-free baseload power: exactly what the world’s surging AI data centers demand. Major tech companies have already begun signing multi-gigawatt power purchase agreements directly with advanced reactor developers, which has reinforced the case for SMR deployment, experts said.
The US Department of Energy projects that HALEU requirements will exceed 40 metric tons per year by 2030 and potentially exceed 500 metric tons by 2050 if commitment to zero emissions is kept. The only Western production today is the Centrus pilot cascade in Piketon, Ohio, which delivered 900 kilograms in mid-2025.
“The market is currently paralyzed by a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma:” enrichment operators will not invest in HALEU production without firm offtake agreements and SMR developers cannot get project financing without reliable domestic fuel commitments, according to Shadi.
The US DOE has committed $2.7 billion over a decade to break this deadlock, but industrial scaling is likely to stay challenging until 2030.
Toxic relationships
Relationships in the global nuclear energy sector tend to last decades. It is in Moscow’s best interest for Rosatom to lock in as many dependencies as possible in the next five years before Western companies can build up enough capacity to no longer need it.
Rosatom provides more than fuel: it also licenses its technology. For example, French nuclear operator Framatome hopes to produce nuclear fuel in Germany based on Russia’s Rosatom license. This, too, is a long-term relationship.
“So it's opposite to sanctions actually. It's supporting Russian technologies to to use them within the European Union and Eastern Europe,” said Olena Pavlenko, president of Ukrainian think tank DiXi Group.
The heads of Urenco and Orano told Financial Times that without a plan to end imports, Europe risks relying on Moscow for decades to come.
Yet choosing to end relationships with Russia and endure temporary financial pain for the sake of greater energy independence requires political will.
This will isn’t absent, just uneven. The REPower EU roadmap issued last month explicitly stated a goal to depart from Russian nuclear dependence. Finland and the Czech Republic are actively diversifying—US company Westinghouse has successfully qualified its fuel for VVER-1000 reactors and Framatome is advancing the SAVE project for the more technically demanding VVER-440 units.
A source close to EU decisionmakers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there are explicit growing calls to target “the untouchables” like Rosatom.
Still, the EU has not enacted a comprehensive ban on Russian nuclear imports, primarily because Hungary exercised an effective veto. Even after the ouster of pro-Russian prime minister Viktor Orban, Budapest appears to be proceeding with the Russian-financed- and-built Paks II plant expansion, creating a conflict of interest within the bloc.
The absence of bloc-wide political consensus gets in the way of the EU from doing what the US did under President Joe Biden: banning Russian fuel outright.
“The world of uranium provision and enrichment is a relatively small one,” DeVore said. “The actors have become quite close and quite good at lobbying their governments not to apply the same types of policies towards them that you would see for other economic actors.”
This is part two of a series of three articles that explore Russian state nuclear conglomerate Rosatom, its role in the war in Ukraine, and Moscow’s international influence.
