German authorities said Wednesday they were giving the green light to a controversial French-Russian nuclear project which critics fear will enable spying and sabotage by Moscow.
The planned joint venture by a subsidiary of French company Framatome and Russia's state-owned nuclear power agency Rosatom is aimed at producing fuel rods used in Russian-designed reactors.
The project would be based at Framatome's fuel rod assembly facility in the town of Lingen in the state of Lower Saxony.
Framatome's subsidiary ANF (Advanced Nuclear Fuels) applied for permission for the project in March 2022, just weeks after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The state's environment ministry said in a statement Wednesday it had "decided to approve" the project.
This was despite the state's environment minister, Christian Meyer, restating his position that "dealings and close co-operation with Putin's nuclear agency are totally wrong".
He said however that his ministry had "no legal possibility to reject or put a time limit to the application" in the absence of sanctions on Rosatom.
Rosatom has been exempted from the successive rounds of EU sanctions imposed against Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
'Dangerous to security'
Meyer said that one of the conditions of the approval was that Rosatom employees or those from Russian nuclear fuel manufacturer TVEL would only be allowed to enter the site "in very limited cases and accompanied by the relevant inspectorate".
The ministry also stressed that the approval could be revisited "if new risks are identified", particularly "in the area of national security".
Roderich Kiesewetter, a prominent member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's centre-right CDU party, said Wednesday that the federal government should intervene to prevent the project from going ahead.
The decision by Lower Saxony was "dangerous to security and must be reversed," Kiesewetter told the Politico website.
The Greens have also been vocal critics of the plan, saying it will that enable Moscow to harvest "information on very sensitive nuclear facilities on German soil".
Germany is Ukraine's biggest backer in its fight to repel Russia's full-scale invasion and has been on high alert for signs of "hybrid warfare" directed by Moscow.
Germany itself closed the last of its own nuclear reactors in 2023.
Former countries from the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as Finland, have nuclear power plants designed in the Soviet era and still need suitable fuel of the kind the project in Lingen will produce.
Russia also controls a large share of the global uranium supply thanks to its reserves and its interests in former Soviet states such as Kazakhstan.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
