While Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military occupies Ukraine’s largest nuclear plant and attacks the country's power infrastructure, Europe and the United States still depend on Russian nuclear fuel to power their own electricity grids.
Canadian-owned Westinghouse Electric is among the companies that receive low enriched uranium (LEU) from Russia to fuel commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S., shipping data analyzed by CBC’s the fifth estate shows.
The U.S. banned the import of Russian enriched uranium in August 2024 in order “to sever U.S. dependence on Russian material and secure a strong domestic fuel supply,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
But the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act allows the DOE to waive the ban if “no alternative viable source of LEU is available” or the “import of the LEU is in the national interest.”
The Bellona Environmental Transparency Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, reported in June that the U.S. imported 400 tonnes of low enriched uranium from Russia in 2025 alone worth around $1 billion US, and that the major recipients included subsidiaries of the French-owned nuclear company Framatome (more than 127 tonnes), U.S. nuclear fuel supplier Global Nuclear Fuel Americas (more than 110 tonnes) and Westinghouse (around 27 tonnes).
The European Union has no ban on the import of Russian enriched uranium and Canada has not sanctioned doing business with Russia’s state atomiс energy corporation Rosatom or its export arm, Tenex.
“We are against these exports while there is this situation of war [and a] direct threat to Ukraine,” said Dmitry Gorchakov, nuclear adviser at Bellona and co-author of the June report on Russia’s nuclear industry and the war in Ukraine.
“All countries should try to lower their dependence on Russia and cancel all possible co-operation.”
The fifth estate analyzed shipping data between Westinghouse and Tenex from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, collected by the commercial search engine ImportYeti. Over the four-year period of the war in Ukraine, Moscow-based Tenex exported various amounts of uranium from Russia to the address of Westinghouse’s sprawling fuel fabrication plant outside Columbia, S.C.
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In one shipment in March of this year, Tenex reportedly delivered 50,612 kilograms of uranium to Westinghouse in four containers, departing Russia from the port of St. Petersburg and arriving in the U.S. at the port of Baltimore.
Enriched uranium shipped to Westinghouse’s South Carolina facility is processed into fuel pellets and then put into fuel rod assemblies that are sent to commercial nuclear power reactors.
“The way that it works is that usually a utility purchases uranium from a source and then the uranium is transported,” said Curtis Roberts, vice-president of communications at Orano USA, a subsidiary of the French nuclear fuel provider that also manages shipment of uranium to the U.S.
“The customer, the utility, is the one then who has a contract with the fuel fabricator. They purchase their uranium, their uranium is transferred to the fuel fabricator, the fuel fabricator then turns it into whatever fuel form is requested by the customer. And then the customer receives the fuel assembly to put into their reactor.”
