Event

Abstract: Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the nuclear fuel supply chain has become a renewed site of political concern, with European, North American and Japanese states and firms investing in infrastructures to reduce dependence on Russian uranium products. This article explores how power operates within this supply chain, moving beyond energy geopolitics narratives built over resource-based and chokepoint-centered approaches to consider how circulation is maintained through everyday practices. Drawing on assemblage thinking as well as political geography’s engagement with materiality, the paper conceptualizes the nuclear fuel chain as an unstable assemblage whose continuity depends on the work of actors that stitch together heterogeneous elements: places, materials, regulations, infrastructures, expertise, and timing. Empirically, we apply a follow-the-thing approach to an exemplary nuclear fuel chain, linking Australian mining, Canadian conversion, U.S. enrichment, Swedish reconversion, and Spanish fabrication for Swiss reactors. We combine legal documents analysis and observation of industry forums and interviews with industry actors to identify the moments and sites where stitching work happens. Here, our analysis highlights four modalities of power: (1) intermediation, (2) metrological authority, (3) optionality management and (4) temporal control. This paper argues that power through energy supply chains resides less in the control of place or resources, than in the mundane practices that sustain circulation across fragmented regimes, and in the capacity to maintain movement rather than just to interrupt it.

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