The French company Orano says litigation is now its only possible recourse after Niger's Council of Ministers announced plans to appropriate and nationalise the joint venture with Niger's state-owned mining assets company.

The US Department of the Interior has approved Anfield Energy Inc's Velvet-Wood uranium-vanadium project in San Juan County, Utah, after the Bureau of Land Management completed its review of the project in less than 14 days.

Rosatom Director General Alexey Likhachev has said the USA continues to buy enriched uranium from Russia and "in the context of the ongoing negotiations between the US and the Russian Federation ... we can expand the agenda of this cooperation".

Kazakhstan's national atomic company Kazatomprom has secured a credit facility for the construction of a new 800,000 tonnes per year sulphuric acid plant in Taikonur, in the Turkestan region.

The US Department of the Interior has announced it will expedite the permitting review of Anfield Energy's Velvet-Wood mine in Utah under newly established emergency procedures, with a completion timeline of 14 days for an accelerated environmental review by the Bureau of Land Management.

It is a time of great opportunity for nuclear - but fuel cycle players must work together to seize the moment and make sure the fuel cycle is ready to support a global tripling of nuclear energy. This was the message from the opening session of the World Nuclear Fuel Cycle 2025 conference.

Deep Yellow's board has decided to defer a decision to construct a processing plant at the Namibian uranium project until the market provides sufficient incentive - but has also said it believes price improvements are inevitable.

The trend of declining uranium exploration and mine development expenditure has been reversed - but substantial investment in new mining projects will be essential to meet nuclear power generation projections to 2050 and beyond, according to the latest edition of the key OECD/IAEA joint report.

The nuclear fuel cycle is the series of industrial processes that turns uranium into electricity. Claire Maden takes a look at the steps that make up the cycle, the major players and the potential pinch-points.