Assessing the weaponability of enriched uranium trade in the geopolitics of nuclear energy: The EU-Russia interrelations

Abstract

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 revived the debates over Moscow's grip on the nuclear fuel market. European and American governments had since planned for policies to diminish their reliance on Russian supplies, motivated by fear of the Kremlin using it as a coercive diplomatic tool, drawing parallels with experiences of fossil fuels exportation disruptions. While global interest for atomic energy is on the rise again, this article aims at assessing the weaponability of nuclear fuel trades, i.e., the conditions in which they can be used by suppliers to politically constrain importing nations. Geopolitics scholarship had until recently paid little attention to nuclear power and the few existing works overlooked the supply issue. In this paper, we bridge existing literature on the “energy weapon” to build a renewed analytical framework to identify the conditions in which fuel trade interdependencies can be coercively used. We then applied it to the case of enriched uranium trade between Russia and European Union's member states. Data were gathered through analysis of a textual corpus consisting of articles from three main magazines focused on nuclear power—Nuclear Engineering International, World Nuclear News and NucNet — (n = 439), 14 semi-structured interviews and three international conferences observations. Results show that Russia's weaponization capacity of enriched uranium trades against Europe in low, but not inexistent, thanks to supply diversification strategies, existing inventories, ongoing production overcapacity, transport fluidity and partial dependence of Rosatom on exports. However, countries' vulnerability isn't homogenous through Europe, and the low weapon ability of nuclear fuel is largely dependent on the fragile equilibrium in the supply and demand balance. Finally, this paper identifies the limits of applying weaponization theories developed in the context of fossil fuel trades to the case of nuclear power.