Nuclear Monitor #936
Jan van Evert
The French police arrested four Greenpeace activists on March 2nd who tried to prevent a Russian ship from unloading its cargo in the harbour of Dunkirk in the north of France. The Mikhail Dudin is a ship sailing under the Panamanian flag and owned by a company registered in Hong Kong. Greenpeace claims it has “on numerous occasions” observed the ship unloading Russian natural and enriched uranium in France.
About twenty activists participated in the action carrying signs reading “Stop toxic contracts” and “Solidarity with Ukrainians”. Greenpeace has repeatedly accused France of maintaining ties with Russia’s state-owned energy company, Rosatom, despite the war in Ukraine. The protesters tried to stop the ship with a large banner stretching across the lock reading “Uranium: EDF loves Putin”. Greenpeace France also observed that the Russian ship made several stops at the port of Rotterdam before arriving in Dunkirk, or sometimes when departing from there.
In 2018, France’s state owned company EDF signed a € 600 million deal with a Rosatom subsidiary, Tenex, for reprocessed uranium from French nuclear power plants to be sent to Russia to be converted and re-enriched to be reused in nuclear power plants. In 2025 France imported at least 112 tonnes of enriched uranium and its compounds from Russia, a quarter of its total purchases by volume. Rosatom has the only facility in the world that is capable of carrying out key parts of the conversion of reprocessed uranium to enriched reprocessed uranium.
In 2022, France ordered EDF to stop its uranium trade with Rosatom when Greenpeace first revealed the contracts in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But in March 2024, Jean-Michel Quilichini, head of the nuclear fuel division at EDF, said his company planned to continue to “honour” its 2018 contract.
In March 2024 France said it was “seriously” looking at the possibility of building its own conversion facility to produce enriched reprocessed uranium.
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