...near Eunice, N.M., in August 2006. Construction will end late this year, but regulatory processes are not yet completed. Areva plans to start building its $2-billion enrichment plant at Eagle Rock in Idaho Falls, Idaho, in 2011, for completion in 2014. “We must be close to our client,” says Perrat.

Using proven technology, Perrat is confident of getting the 3-million SWU plant built on time. But he wonders about the decision to develop new, larger technology by Areva’s sole enrichment rival, in the U.S., USEC Inc., Bethesda, Md.

The other end of Areva’s nuclear cycle is at La Hague, near Cherbourg. At the vast site, Areva extracts valuable fissile material from spent fuel burned in French and foreign reactors. After some four years in use, the residue inside reactor fuel rods is about 95% uranium, 1% plutonium and the rest high-level waste, says Rémi Coulon, Areva’s strategy and international projects director for spent fuel.

Areva now stores all France’s high-level waste, which has been vitrified, in La Hague. It amounts to 1,800 cu m in some 9,000 containers, say officials. The waste will remain there until France’s repository is built. A 2006 law set a timetable for the National Radioactive Waste Management Agency (ANDRA) to have a repository licensed by 2015 and operational a decade later, says Coulon. Clay under Bure, some 300 km east of Paris, is the favored site.

La Hague’s recovered fissile material is trucked in unmarked containers 1,000 km south to be turned into fuel at Areva’s Melox plant, near Bagnols sur Cèze. “We do not consider it as waste and nor do our clients,” says Coulon. Recycling “is just a service. We never at any point own the materials.”

Mixed oxide fuel made at Melox, including recycled plutonium, is used in 20 French reactors. Recycled uranium is mostly stored for future use, but some is made into fuel at Areva’s Pierrelat plant.

All Areva’s nuclear businesses, from fuel to recycling, have a part in EdF’s newest plant, at Flamanville, visible from La Hague. Sitting at the toe of a 50-m-high seaside cliff, the plant is rising next to two 1,300-MW PWRs of an earlier design.

Nearly 20 tower cranes are at work at Flamanville 3, two of them with stems enclosed in concrete rings to prevent them from falling onto the adjacent, active...