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Russia’s exclusion from uranium fuel supply chains has made the case for restarting one of the UK’s biggest nuclear power plants more compelling, the facility’s joint owner has said.
The comments by Grant Isaac, finance director at Canada’s Cameco, part-owner of the Springfields nuclear site in Preston, northern England, came after Russia last month banned exports of enriched uranium fuel to the US. Uranium is a key fuel needed to run nuclear plants.
The move by Russia, in retaliation for the US ban on imports of Russian uranium products, is the latest step in the gradual removal of Russian-origin fuel in supply chains that serve members of the OECD, a group of industrialised countries.
Tensions have escalated since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, leading to western sanctions against a country accounting for about 35 per cent of the global capacity for uranium conversion, in which the uranium ore is turned into a gas.
The divisions could boost demand for facilities outside Russia that transform uranium for use as a nuclear fuel.
That would strengthen the case for Pennsylvania-based Westinghouse, owner of the Springfields site, to restart uranium conversion in the UK for the first time since the plant stopped doing the work in 2014.
Cameco owns 49 per cent of Westinghouse, with Brookfield Asset Management holding 51 per cent.
“Given the market bifurcation, the likelihood of finding industrial support from customers is higher than it’s ever been,” Isaac said, suggesting that Westinghouse was close to deciding on restarting conversion at Springfields.
Conversion is a key stage in the nuclear fuel cycle and is necessary to allow fuel to be enriched to increase the proportion of the uranium-235 isotope required to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.
Among OECD countries, only France, the US and Canada have currently operating uranium conversion facilities, while there are sites in Russia, China and Iran.
Westinghouse chief executive Patrick Fragman said the company had received “positive preliminary feedback” from potential customers for uranium conversion services.
But Isaac stressed they would need to secure long-term supply contracts before starting work to revive the facility. “You want to make sure that you’re making investments . . . for which there’s a demand,” he said. “You secure that demand through long-term contracting conversations with customers.”
Westinghouse received a £13mn grant from the UK government in December 2022 to fund “design and enabling” work to restart uranium conversion at the plant. It will decide next year on whether to go ahead with conversion work, Fragman said.
Isaac said the work could start at the end of the decade, as long as the necessary contracts had been signed. The timeline was “not that alarming” because power utilities would have enough stockpiles to see them through until the new supply became available, he insisted.
“It’s not like utilities by and large are short of the material today,” he said.
The UK’s energy security department said the new government was reversing past failures to deliver new nuclear capacity and was “exploring restoring uranium conversion operations at Springfields”.
The Springfields site employs about 1,000 people in other stages of the nuclear fuel cycle and recently produced a new kind of fuel pellet for use at its Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia, US.
