VVER

European utilities are still buying Russian uranium at a rate well above that of other Western jurisdictions, and a fuel manufacturing plant in Eastern Germany illustrates just how tangled those threads remain.

The plant at Lingen is operated by the French state-owned fuel manufacturer Framatome and is intended to produce fuel for Russian-designed VVER reactors.

Framatom presents it as an effort to wean European reactor owners off Russian fuel.

But as a lawsuit filed last week by a group of German environmental organizations pointed out, the facility will use nuclear manufacturing technology, expertise, and equipment designed and manufactured in Russia and sold to Framatom by Rosatom, the same state-owned monopoly that would otherwise be supplying the fuel.

The German government's position, in effect, is that while it may disagree with what Framatom is doing, there's nothing in the law preventing it.

There is another piece to this, and it changes how the situation should be read.

The American fuel manufacturer Westinghouse has already been selling fuel for VVER reactors to European countries moving away from Russian supply, beginning with Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Since then, several other central and eastern European utilities making a concerted effort to get off Russian fuel and reactor services have taken Westinghouse up on that offer.

On August 20th, Uzbekistan's president told an investment ceremony in the west of the country that the state will soon begin extensive preparations for a second nuclear power plant, and he said it before the first one is anywhere near finished.

That first plant under construction in central Uzbekistan poured nuclear-grade concrete in early June and combines two large VVER-1000 units with two small modular units of 55 megawatts each for a 2.11 gigawatts in total, at a headline cost of $9.5 billion, delivering roughly 15% of national security when the large units arrive in 2033 and 2035.

The following day, the head of Uzbekistan Atomic Energy Agency met with Kazakhstan's Vice Minister of Ecology, and the two agreed to build a joint roadmap on nuclear radiation and environmental safety, together with a regional training center aligned to IAEA standards.

Kazakhstan is planning at least three plants of its own, starting with two VVER-1200 units at Lake Balkash, near $16.5 billion, with China National Nuclear Corporation leading the second and third.