Urenco, Almelo & the Gronau / Capenhurst / Eunice network
The Western world's leading enricher, the only counterweight of scale to Rosatom's ≈43–44%. Its centrifuge technology, protected by the Treaty of Almelo, is the bottleneck of any scenario for exiting Russian enrichment. The expansions (Eunice, Gronau, Capenhurst) will not deliver their SWU before 2027-2030.
The Rosatom quarter that cannot be recalled
The arithmetic of nuclear decoupling is unfavorable. Rosatom accounts for nearly 44 % of global enrichment capacity; Urenco, the best Western counterweight, caps out around 30 %, with Orano making up the rest. Banning Russian enrichment, which the United States voted in May 2024 with the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act, does not conjure up the missing SWU: the law itself provides waivers until 2028, for lack of an available alternative.
For capacity cannot be decreed: a centrifuge cascade takes five to eight years to build. The expansions of Urenco (Eunice in New Mexico, Gronau, Capenhurst) and Orano will not deliver at full capacity until between 2027 and 2030. Until then, the West depends on a supplier it is otherwise sanctioning, an untenable situation that only industrial time can resolve, not political will.
HALEU, a monopoly within the monopoly
The finest dependency concerns high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU, 5 to 20 %), the fuel of most small modular and advanced reactors on which the West is betting for its nuclear revival. Yet today there is only one commercial HALEU supplier at scale: Rosatom.
Against it, Centrus produces at Piketon about 900 kg a year, an order of magnitude below the needs announced by the wave of American reactor start-ups. The Treaty of Almelo, which protects Urenco's centrifuge technology, moreover limits transfers. Tomorrow's nuclear sovereignty, meant to free itself from Moscow, thus runs into a bottleneck that Moscow is for now the only one able to fill in volume.