Media: Macron to visit Central Asia to negotiate increase in uranium supplies

President Emmanuel Macron will travel to energy-rich Central Asia this week to visit Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, two suppliers of the uranium that powers the country’s nuclear reactors, Report informs referring to Bloomberg.

The trip aims to boost France’s energy security, according to two people familiar with the French president’s thinking, who declined to be named when discussing matters of diplomacy. These efforts are in keeping with a wider European effort to diversify away from the Russian fossil fuels on which the bloc was formerly so reliant.

France already boasts some large investments in the region; for instance, French nuclear company Orano SA — formerly known as Areva — exploits uranium deposits in Kazakhstan via a joint venture with state-owned Kazatomprom. Deepening Orano’s presence will be on the menu of discussions, according to one delegation insider, who declined to be named discussing details of the trip.

Yet France’s pursuit of uranium is freighted with a greater urgency in the wake of a coup this July in Niger, which last year was second only to Kazakhstan as the EU’s biggest source of the raw material. Orano had to stop processing uranium ore at one of its facilities in the Saharan republic because international sanctions against the military junta were hampering logistics, it said last month.

Kazakhstan also has plans to start extracting rare-earth metals next year, at a time when Macron has called for France to be less dependent on Chinese raw materials crucial to Europe’s electric-car industry.

Even so, earlier this year the French president made a state visit to China, underscoring a strategy of distancing himself from the US’s more hawkish stance on Beijing, and in line with his attempts to expand France’s influence in Asia.

Macron recently became the first French president to visit Mongolia, later signing a deal to source more uranium, while last year he was the first French leader to attend an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit with the countries of the Pacific Rim.