European Union countries say they are turning to nuclear to reduce their dependence on Russia for gas and LNG.
Yet, according to Euratom data, the EU imported about 16 per cent of its raw uranium from Russia in 2024, two years after the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
Greenpeace says the real dependency does not lie in the ore itself but in what happens afterwards: The chain of specialised steps needed to turn uranium into fuel.
A spokesperson told Brussels Signal yesterday that Europe is “most dependent on Russia” for exactly those stages — converting uranium into gas, enriching it and shaping it into the fuel assemblies used inside reactors.
Those are highly specialised services, controlled by a handful of companies worldwide.
This was confirmed by Niels Vanacker from the Belgian Nuclear Forum.”Thus far only about five companies can do it … France, Netherlands, the UK, the US, and other countries have launched massive investments to be able to do it, when the war started … but it takes time and the effects will likely and hopefully be felt in the next two years,” he said yesterday.
Greenpeace’s Jan Vande Putte, the organisation’s nuclear expert, said Russian State-owned company Rosatom’s dominance in conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication means that “whether you buy uranium fuel with or without Russian components, you strengthen Russia directly or indirectly.”
Europe, he said, remains “most dependent” on Moscow precisely where the market is smallest and most specialised — not in ore extraction but in the transformation processes that sit at the heart of nuclear operations.
Jonathan Bruegel, a power specialist at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), says the inertia is also technical.
“The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria … still import Russian uranium,” he told Brussels Signal this morning,.
He added that many “eastern European countries’ reactors” are Soviet-designed water-cooled, water-moderated power (VVER) units, which require specific fuel assemblies.
“There are alternative suppliers and considerable resources elsewhere — Namibia, Malawi, … but adaptation costs and logistics make the switch slow,” Bruegel said.
To Greenpeace, it is a structural vulnerability. “You can safely say that of all Russian energy, the EU is most dependent on nuclear,” Vande Putte said. “The dependency remains extremely large.”
To nuclear-industry advocates, the dependence is manageable in the medium term.
As Vanacker put it: “Uranium can be bought from many countries. The challenges lie in the specialised processes … and countries are investing to solve that.”
To many governments, it is an uncomfortable contradiction and, across Europe, the limits of this paradox are already visible.
France — the EU’s flagship nuclear nation — has repeatedly pledged to cut ties with Rosatom, yet French power company EDF continues sending some of its reprocessed uranium to Russia. Some of the only companies in the world capable of recycling uranium to make it reusable for fuel production are currently located in Russia, Vanacker said. However, he added that European investment in the sector should begin to show results in the coming years.
But Orano, EDF’s historic partner, still lacks the necessary capacity to take over, despite announcing it for years, according to France Info.
The recycling effort itself is far behind schedule. Only 15 per cent of depleted uranium stocks were converted in 2025, compared to an initial target of 60 per cent.
To make up for the shortfall, France quietly resumed importing natural Russian uranium — despite years of official promises of “sovereignty” regarding the chemical element, french media reported.
The price gap is steep: Recycling in France costs around 40 per cent more than the Russian service. In the words of French analysts, a complete divorce would be “economically untenable”.
Elsewhere, the dependency is more subtle. Finland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary remain tied to Russian-designed reactor fleets.
Switching fuel providers requires years of engineering work and regulatory certification, Greenpeace says and, in some countries — notably Hungary — political incentives to accelerate the process simply do not exist.
“It’s not the price,” Vande Putte said. “It’s a mix of political choices and the complexity of changing supplier.”
Belgium had already stopped receiving uranium from Russia before the invasion. The last delivery arrived in 2021, Vanacker said, when the country still planned to shut down its reactors entirely.
That changed with the political decision to keep nuclear power and extend two units.
Because uranium has extremely high energy density and is easy to store for long periods, so before the invasion, in 2021, Belgium had already stockpiled enough fuel for several years. With the extensions now confirmed, French multinational electricity group Engie — which co-owns Belgian facilities with the Belgian state — has required that all future steps in the uranium chain avoid Russian services.
“But for the extension of our reactors, we are already fully independent of Russia,” Vanacker said.
He noted, though, that the wider European picture is more complex and different countries have different supply chains and made different investments to replace processes that are now outsourced to Russia.
Still, all uranium-related imports from Russia only represent about 1 per cent of what the EU spent on Russian gas in 2022, the year it invaded Ukraine.
