In Avignon, an executive from Orano, the French company that operates across the nuclear fuel cycle, described his business as a kind of “insurance policy” against geopolitical risk and competition for critical resources. He was talking about uranium supply, but his point reached well beyond mining. Every reactor depends on a network of companies and facilities that can stretch across several countries, from the source of the uranium to the plants that prepare it for use as nuclear fuel.
As more countries consider expanding nuclear power, that network matters more. More reactors mean greater demand for uranium and enrichment services, followed years later by more spent fuel that has to be stored, recycled or disposed of. The war in Ukraine and wider geopolitical tensions have also pushed governments to look more closely at where their energy comes from and how dependent they are on particular countries.
Orano has been responding by diversifying uranium supply across countries including Canada, Kazakhstan and Mongolia and by investing in enrichment capacity. Enrichment sounds highly technical, but the basic idea is straightforward: natural uranium has to be processed so that it can be used as fuel in most commercial reactors. A country may operate the reactor itself and still rely on facilities thousands of kilometres away to prepare the fuel that keeps it running.
For me, the discussion became especially interesting when it moved to what happens after that fuel has been used.
France has spent decades building a system that recovers useful material from spent nuclear fuel. Some of that recovered material is used to make MOX fuel, which combines plutonium recovered from used fuel with uranium and can then be loaded into certain reactors.
In 2025, France decided to continue that strategy for another generation. Its existing recycling facilities at La Hague and Melox are being prepared for longer operation, and plans are being developed for new facilities in the 2040s and 2050s. Decisions being made now could still be shaping the French nuclear system many decades from today.
The Orano representative argued that recycling can reduce the radiotoxicity of material ultimately requiring disposal by roughly a factor of ten and save up to a quarter of the natural uranium that would otherwise be needed. He also connected future recycling facilities with advanced reactor designs that may be able to make greater use of recovered nuclear material.
Countries have taken different approaches to spent fuel. Some store it with the intention of eventually placing it directly into a deep geological repository. France has built an industrial system around recovering material for reuse. Recycling still leaves radioactive material that has to be managed safely, so the choice involves what a country wants to recover, what it is prepared to build and how long it can sustain that policy.
For someone from Japan, this part of the discussion immediately connects with Rokkasho.
Japan has pursued a recycling policy for decades, and the centrepiece is the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Aomori Prefecture. It is being built by Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited, or JNFL, the company responsible for several major parts of Japan’s domestic nuclear fuel-cycle infrastructure. Rokkasho is intended to take spent fuel from Japanese reactors and recover uranium and plutonium that can be used again.
Construction began in 1993, and commercial operation has still not started more than thirty years later. JNFL continues to list completion by the end of fiscal 2026, with a separate MOX fuel fabrication plant targeted for fiscal 2027. By October 2026, the timetable is under visible pressure. The governor of Aomori has said he expects another delay, and JNFL continues to work toward the existing schedule.
I was born years after construction began at Rokkasho, and Japan is still working to bring the plant into operation. That alone gives some sense of the scale of the commitment involved.
France and Japan are now at very different points in similar policies. France is planning the next generation of recycling infrastructure. Japan is still trying to complete the system it committed to decades ago.
Rokkasho is also much more than a delayed construction project. A reprocessing plant has to bring engineering, nuclear regulation, local relationships, national energy policy and the management of plutonium together over a very long period. Governments, regulations, costs and public expectations all shift over a span this long, and the project has to keep moving through all of it.
Japan is still preparing for the plant to operate. In January 2026, JNFL published provisional plans showing how reprocessing could gradually increase after operations begin, eventually moving toward the plant’s maximum annual capacity of 800 tonnes of uranium around fiscal 2032.
Those plans also show how closely each part of the system depends on the others. Recovered plutonium has to be made into MOX fuel, and reactors have to be available to use it. The remaining radioactive waste still has to be managed safely over the long term. Starting the plant would be a major milestone and the beginning of another long phase.
The same need for patience and planning appears at the beginning of the fuel cycle. Uranium mines and enrichment facilities take years to develop. The Orano executive explained that the company could invest in additional enrichment capacity in France because customers were prepared to make long-term commitments. Confidence in future demand gives companies a reason to make investments whose value may only become clear years later.
That matters for Japan because the country has no significant domestic uranium resources. Nuclear fuel is compact and can be stored for long periods, which gives it advantages for energy security. Japan still relies on overseas facilities and relationships for important parts of the fuel supply, so decisions about suppliers, enrichment and long-term contracts have to be made years before the fuel is actually needed.
By this point in the discussion, I was thinking about the system that has to exist around every reactor. A reactor may operate for sixty years or more, and the decisions that make its fuel available, determine what happens to spent fuel and support recycling can stretch even further.
For Japan, this is already a real policy question. We have committed to recycling, we have spent decades building the infrastructure for it, and we are still working through what it takes to make the system operate as intended.
Looking at France and Japan together makes the scale of these choices easier to understand. Fuel policy has to be carried through, adjusted and supported over decades as technology, regulation and the energy system itself continue to change.
For someone entering the nuclear field now, that is one of the most striking things about it. Many of the decisions being made today will still be shaping the industry when my generation is the one responsible for running it.