France accused of funding Putin’s war effort

Pursuit of nuclear trade with Russia while fighting in Ukraine continues is a scandal, says Greenpeace

‘Russian nuclear terror requires a stronger response from the international community’

FRANCE has been accused of helping to fund Vladimir Putin’s war effort by still importing nuclear fuel from Russia.

Greenpeace yesterday called it “scandalous” that uranium is being bought by European firms to be used in nuclear power stations across the continent.

The charity this week filmed the arrival of dozens of drums of uranium, both raw and enriched, from Russia at the northern French port of Dunkirk.

Imports of nuclear fuel from Russia remain legal in Europe as Brussels has not been able to ban them in eight rounds of sanctions packages.

While Europe has been weaning itself off Russian fossil fuels since the invasion of Ukraine, its nuclear sector is still dependent on Russia and imports more than €200million (£171million) worth of uranium every year.

Germany has sought a total ban, but the reliance of Hungary and other eastern nations on the fuel means a unanimous vote among the EU’S 27 member states is off the cards.

“The pursuit of the nuclear trade with Russia while the war in Ukraine rages is scandalous,” said Pauline Boyer, in charge of the Nuclear and Energy Transition campaigns at Greenpeace France. “It’s business as usual.”

The group is calling for France – via its state-run nuclear utilities EDF and Orano – to sever all ties with the Russian nuclear industry, and notably to statecontrolled Rosatom, which is directly under Mr Putin’s command.

Rosatom runs the civilian industry but is also in charge of Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal and is overseeing the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station in Ukraine.

After Russian forces shelled the plant, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, called for a halt to nuclear shipments as part of EU sanctions.

“Russian nuclear terror requires a stronger response from the international community [including] sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry and nuclear fuel,” he said.

In October, France announced that EDF and Orano were halting the export of reprocessed uranium to Russia. However, Greenpeace said that the contract was only suspended, not terminated, and “this only represents the visible part of the iceberg” as imports of Russian uranium continue unabated.

Framatome, a nuclear power plant and fuel provider, and subsidiary of EDF, this week confirmed that the Dunkirk shipment did indeed contain “materials to make nuclear fuel” destined for its “customers and notably the French nuclear fleet”.

The shipments fully respected “international sanctions”, EDF insisted.

Orano said that it had no link to the shipments and that “no new contract regarding the purchase or sale of nuclear materials has been signed (by the group) since the start of the war”. The French state-controlled uranium producer said in October it was considering growing its capacity to enrich uranium into nuclear fuel by almost 50 per cent, either in plants in France or the US, to reduce reliance on Russia.

While nuclear power generates around one quarter of electricity in the EU as a whole, the share amounts to more than 40 per cent in Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria, and more than 70 per cent for France, according to EU figures.

Normally, an exporter of electricity due to its 56 nuclear reactors, France is in the midst of its own nuclear energy crisis because around half of its plants are out of action owing to maintenance or corrosion issues.