French nuclear fuel cycle company New AREVA officially has a new name as of Tuesday: Orano.
Orano is the result of a corporate restructuring AREVA initiated in 2016 that late last year resulted in the sale of the company’s nuclear power business to French utility EDF and other entities. What was left was almost entirely held by New AREVA, now Orano: nuclear materials development and waste management, encompassing mining, conversion-enrichment, used fuel recycling, nuclear logistics, dismantlement, and engineering.
That covers the U.S. subsidiary formed in early 2017 as AREVA Nuclear Materials, spokesman Curtis Roberts confirmed Tuesday. The company does business in the United States in nuclear decommissioning and dismantlement, nuclear fuel and radioactive waste management, and environmental management, among other services, for government and commercial customers.
The rebranding does not feature “any other organizational or structural changes,” Roberts said by email.
Orano encompasses 16,000 workers and $4 billion euros ($5 billion) in revenue, a company press release says. It also has nearly 3 billion euros ($3.7 billion) of net debt, Reuters reported.
During a presentation Tuesday in Paris, Orano CEO Philippe Knoche acknowledged the challenges facing the company in the face of the 80-percent drop in uranium prices over the last 10 years as nuclear power fell out of favor globally, Reuters reported. But he said the company intends to reach cash-flow positive status and anticipates growth in the Asian nuclear sector – where negotiations on the sale of nuclear fuel reprocessing facility technology to China are “accelerating.”
“Orano symbolizes a new start. A new start that has been under preparation for several years now,” Knoche said in the company press release. “We have set up a new organizational structure, a new business plan, a new strategic action plan and a new social contract. Our new identity is the natural result of all this.”
New name aside, Orano remains a key player in the U.S. Department of Energy contracting world, including as a partner in CB&I AREVA MOX Services, which is building a facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to convert surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) is also being considered to take over production of nuclear weapons cores, or “pits,” from DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“We will need to update the name of our joint venture at MFFF, but that has not been determined at this time,” Roberts stated.
In the U.S. commercial nuclear cleanup space, Orano is part of the team that will work on decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant once its sale from Entergy to NorthStar Group Services is complete. Its focus is on segmenting, packaging, and transportation for off-site disposal of the reactor pressure vessel and other reactor parts from the retired facility, similar to services the company has provided at several other U.S. nuclear power sites.
Orano is also partnering with NorthStar in Accelerated Decommissioning Partners, which aims to acquire and decommission other U.S. nuclear power plants as they retire. The intent is to reap profit from whatever remains of each site’s decommissioning trust when the work is done, as well as payments from the Department of Energy over the agency’s failure to meet its legal requirement to take spent fuel off nuclear plant owners’ hands starting two decades ago.
The new company has been in talks to buy Entergy’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts and Palisades Power Plant in Michigan, along with other properties. Orano executives had no updates on the discussions this week.
