Europe sans Russia does not produce uranium - why people constantly paint this as an independent energy source is beyond me. Of all Russian energy companies, it was Rosatom that could not be sanctioned.

You’re right that European nuclear is not "independent" if that means "mined entirely inside Europe". But the dependency profile is not the same for Russian pipeline gas. Uranium is globally traded, compact, cheap to stockpile relative to the energy it contains, and available from several non-Russian suppliers (Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia, Australia...). The harder choke points are conversion, enrichment, and reactor-specific fuel fabrication.

Europe does have uranium resources, for instance the Salamanca/Retortillo project, but the constraint is permitting, environmental acceptance, waste handling, and political legitimacy rather than geology. So the honest claim is not "nuclear makes Europe autarkic". It is "nuclear gives Europe a more diversifiable and stockpilable dependency than gas, provided Europe also invests in mining, conversion, enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity".

> Europe sans Russia does not produce uranium

Kazakhstan is by far the largest uranium producer in the world and has a leg in Europe, west of the Ural river. The important thing is that there are more stable partners worldwide for uranium than Russia is for oil and gas.

There are deposits in Europe, the respective countries decided not to exploit them [0]. This could change depending on external pressures.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...