Orano
🇫🇷 Châtillon, FR · Active
Also known as New Areva
Orano is a French nuclear fuel-cycle company headquartered in Châtillon, Hauts-de-Seine, and majority owned by the French state. It was created from the 2016 to 2018 restructuring of the nuclear group Areva, taking over its mining, fuel and recycling businesses, and adopted the name Orano on 23 January 2018; its roots go back to COGEMA, founded in 1976. It mines uranium, converts and enriches it at Malvési and Tricastin in France, recycles used fuel at La Hague and Melox, and transports and stores nuclear materials. In 2023 its board approved an expansion of the Georges Besse II enrichment plant. In December 2024 Niger's military government took operational control of its Somaïr uranium mine. It also runs a nuclear medicine subsidiary, Orano Med.
- Sector
- Fuel cycle
- Fuel
- Low-enriched uranium, Mixed oxide fuel
- Role
- Supplier
Terms
- Low-enriched uranium
- Uranium enriched to 5% uranium-235 or less, typically 3 to 5%: the range almost all power reactors use. Formally, anything below 20% is low-enriched; this site holds the band from 5% to just under 20% separately as HALEU, with its 5 to 10% part also tagged as LEU+. A fuel above 5% uranium-235 belongs in one of those, never here, whatever a developer's own materials call it.
- Mixed oxide fuel
- Mixed oxide fuel: plutonium oxide blended with uranium oxide, usually depleted uranium, with commercial MOX typically 7 to 11% plutonium. The plutonium comes from reprocessed spent fuel, so MOX needs no fresh enrichment but depends on a reprocessing plant. Plutonium gives a smaller delayed neutron fraction than uranium-235, one reason thermal reactors usually load MOX into only part of their core.
People
- Nicolas MaesChief Executive Officer