NUCLEAR INDUSTRY: 30 YEARS OF CLOSE PARTNERSHIP

For over 30 years, CIFAL has been working in the front-end activities of the nuclear fuel cycle.

  In the early 1970s, CIFAL played an active role in setting up the first Franco-Russian cooperation agreement in the nuclear field. It bore on the sale of uranium enrichment services to the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). The Russian partner was – and still is – Techsnabexport (TENEX), the commercial contractor of MINATOM, which has now become the State Corporation for Atomic Energy, ROSATOM.

  This cooperative effort grew in the early 1990s, with the involvement of COGEMA through several of its branches and subsidiaries, and this trend has continued to the present day.

 These historic transactions between the COGEMA Group and TENEX were also accompanied by contracts for the sale of French equipment to certain Russian "combinats" specialized in the nuclear fuel cycle. COGEMA and TENEX signed a €50mln contract in 2005 for the transfer of defluorination technology, along with the construction of a defluorination plant in Zelenogorsk (Krasnoyarsk region, Siberia).

  Following the 1999 contract for the purchase and delivery of the natural component low-enriched natural uranium (LEU) to the United States by Russia under the 1993 HEU-LEU Agreement, also known as the "Megatons-to-Megawatts" agreement, CIFAL was entrusted with the follow-up of the contract’s performance on behalf of the group of Western purchasers (COGEMA, CAMECO and NUKEM). The contract lasts until 2013.

Based in Moscow, the "nuclear team" is headed by Jean-Claude ABEILLON and Michael IRGANG.