“I bet that the next multi-million pounds a year mine to be put in operation on this planet will be an Orano mine in Mongolia,” Nicholas Maes said. “And that mine will be producing multi-million pounds per year by the end of the decade, and that will be the next big mine in production.”
Orano marked the start of the construction phase for implementation of the Zuuvch Ovoo project in Mongolia earlier this year. Maes said the company – which is celebrating its 50th anniversary – had worked for decades with the Mongolian government to reach this point, including a negotiation of an investment agreement which received 79% approval in a parliamentary vote. This “unprecedented” support gives a “very strong” legitimacy to the project, he added.
“By the end of October, we’ll already have committed 25% of the spend for this mine. By the end of the decade, it produces,” he said.
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Nicholas Maes (Image: World Nuclear Association)
The project will use in-situ leach (also known as in-situ recovery) methods, and according to previously released information, will have a nominal production capacity of about 2,500 tU per year for a 30-year estimated lifespan, creating 1,600 direct and indirect jobs.
The majority of additional gigawatts that will make up a doubling or tripling of nuclear energy will come from large-scale reactors that are similar to those in operation today – and that is good news from a fuel cycle perspective, Maes said. Although capacity growth may include numerous small modular reactors (SMRs), “when you pull it back into tonnage of fuel, the vast majority” will be similar to the fuel that is already in use.
This is good news for the nuclear fuel supply chain, economically, he said. “Because what that means is that a very significant part of doubling or tripling nuclear will come from existing materials and existing technologies and existing sites. And so they are here and ready to support that effort. It then becomes just a matter of investing in them on time and having a shared vision of when the capacity will be needed. But the technology exists.”
SMRs will complement large-scale reactors, but from a fuel cycle perspective, “our message is there is an absolute need to standardise the fuel, because developing a new type of fuel is as expensive as developing a reactor”, Maes added. “And so, if each and every SMR developer develops its own fuel, then the maths won’t work and the economics won’t be there. And at the end, what matters is that the energy produced by those reactors is efficient. So what we are doing at Orano in that field is to propose and act as a catalyst for all the SMRs which occur so that we can trigger standardisation of the fuel supply chain and then be able to invest in that in an economic fashion.”
Series effect
Maes was a participant in a panel discussion which brought together senior leaders from across the nuclear value chain to highlight significant advances, achievements and new ways of working that will drive progress in the years to come.
EDF Chairman and CEO Bernard Fontana highlighted the return of the “series effect” – building series of reactors with standardised technology. “Until the recent past, we were building here and there, one reactor – this is difficult, expensive”, he said. But, he said – citing the the series of EPR reactors being built at Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C in the UK – “when we build, we can improve, reduce the cost, reduce the time, reduce the risk … And also with those series, it gives visibility to all the supply chains. When they see they can work for 15 years, 20 years, they are prepared to invest”.
Westinghouse Chief Technology Officer Lou Martinez Sancho agreed that standardisation was critical to successful scale-up. She described Vogtle 4 in the USA as Westinghouse’s “copy-and-paste” for the fully-modular AP1000 reactor worldwide. “And that creates that availability on the supply chain as well, and visibility in how it’s going to work. The best way to get certainty on the delivery … is getting certainty on the design that is fully frozen.”
Any series starts with a first-of-a-kind project, and it is important to get that right, GE Vernova Hitachi Chief Commercial Officer Nicole Holmes said. The first-of-a-kind BWRX-300 is under construction at Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) Darlington site in Ontario. “You see the pieces of the project coming together,” Holmes said, going on to highlight the importance of a “bold customer” in OPG, a good site, and alignment between the government and regulator for project success. “Of course, first-of-a-kind is not the goal, but building one, doing it well, learning, repeating, this is how we build the fleet.”
World Nuclear Symposium 2026 is taking place in London from 10-11 September.
