Urenco scaling up capacity to meet rising nuclear fuel demand

And for those who might not be familiar with the work that Urenco does, can you give us an overview of its history, what it does, and where it's operating?

Yeah, sure.

So Urenco is a leading enrichment company.

We provide the third step in the nuclear fuel cycle.

So you've got mining, conversion, and then enrichment, and then you carry on with fabrication.

So Urenco was established in 1970 through the Treaty of Almelo between three countries, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Today, we have four enrichment facilities in four different countries, the UK in Capenhurst, Almelo in the Netherlands, Gronau in Germany, so the three founding countries, as well as a facility in New Mexico in the United States, which we started in 2010.

So the US is our newest facility that serves our largest market, the United States.

So that's quite an unusual structure to have three such different shareholders.

Well, it's even a bit more complex than that because we've got four different shareholders, two countries, the UK and the Netherlands, as well as two utilities, E.ON and RWE, who represent the Germans.

So typically, utilities buy the uranium that you enrich.

Absolutely.

So we are a tall enricher.

So people deliver uranium hexafluoride, UF6, onto the site, and then we do the process of separating the two main isotopes of uranium, the uranium 235 and the uranium 238, to bring it to a level of enrichment for the standard LEU, uh, close to ni- to 5% enrichment.

And then with that enriched uranium product, we deliver it to the fabricators where they've got the fuel rods being built.

Your customers are spread across different continents, your suppliers as well, I guess.

So that must bring in quite considerable transport challenges.

There are some transport challenges.

You're right.

We've got about, you know, more than 50 customers in 20 different countries at the moment, and we've got a few new countries that joined us recently.

We've been able to deliver for Bulgaria and Slovakia lately.

We basically deliver to the fabrication facilities, so they are in North America, in Europe, and in the Far East.

But at the moment, transport is and can be a challenge, but the recent issues in the Strait of Hormuz do not affect us.

We don't have any product going through that route.

The whole fuel cycle is fascinatingly structured for people who are not in the industry.