The “Atoms Family”: Using United States export licenses to analyze the geopolitical dynamics of nuclear fuel supplies

The resurgence of nuclear power following the 2022 energy crisis and Russia's invasion of Ukraine has renewed concerns over geopolitical vulnerability in nuclear fuel supply chains. Existing research has focused on relations of interdependence and their potential weaponization, thanks to the analysis of bilateral relations between exporters and importers or the evaluation of actors' control over infrastructures. This paper argues that such approaches overlook how geopolitical vulnerabilities are also produced through the configuration of fuel supply networks themselves, which generates forms of structural power. To address this issue, the article develops a network-based approach to the geopolitics of nuclear fuel. It reconstructs the global supply network, drawing on a database of 551 United States import and export licenses, collected from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's archive. These data are then studied through a typology of diversification strategies and a network analysis to examine how procurement decisions distribute structural power. The results show that nuclear fuel supply is neither reducible to bilateral producer–consumer dependencies nor organized as a fully globalized market. Procurements are made of composite material trajectories, assembled across multiple facilities at different stages of the cycle. The paper argues that structural power in nuclear fuel geopolitics emerges less from bilateral dependence than from the spatial concentration of midstream infrastructures through which diversified upstream flows must pass, such as conversion. It further shows that geopolitical resilience depends not only on diversifying suppliers, but on the ability to create alternative licensed corridors across stages of the fuel chain.