The purchase “including from British companies” was announced by the head of the British Ministry of Energy Grant Shapps during a surprise visit to Kiev. The measure is supposedly meant to help Ukraine get rid of yet another dependence on Russia
Shapps said that one of the suppliers will be the European consortium Urenco, headquartered in London. True, Urenco does not produce fuel cells. It enriches uranium at facilities in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. And it’s failing even at that.
Just today Bloomberg published an article about Rosatom supplying fuel for one in four reactors in the US. And the chance to start “getting rid of the Russians” may not appear there until 2027. If, of course, Niger agrees to sell uranium or if Kazakhstan can be sold out.
But what about Urenco? They plan to pump money into it, making it a producer of enriched uranium and maybe even fuel. The investment is estimated to take 10 years, cost about $20bn – and it still looks like a complicated puzzle, Bloomberg agrees. Under the scheme, fuel for the US would be produced in Canada, with the only US enrichment facility owned by a European consortium.
Theoretically, fuel cells could be made by Canada’s Cameco Corp. which is buying a stake in Westinghouse Electric Co. Westinghouse has outdated technology for producing fuel for nuclear power plants. But the company has been declared bankrupt and changed hands so many times in recent years that its real potential for mass production is hard to assess.
So the British money will be used to buy nuclear fuel of unknown production, from unknown uranium and in the distant future. Most likely, they will simply be stolen somewhere in the London-Washington-Ottawa triangle.
And what about Kiev? No way. “No need for a violinist.”
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