Germany Weighs €4bn Buyout of RWE and E.ON’s Urenco Stake

Germany’s government is examining a plan to buy out RWE’s and E.ON’s combined one-third stake in Urenco, the Anglo-Dutch-German uranium enrichment group, in a deal German media have valued at up to €4 billion ($4.3 billion). The move, first reported by the newspaper Welt on Thursday evening and followed up by Handelsblatt and Der Spiegel, would hand Berlin direct ownership of a company that enriches fuel for reactors across Europe and the United States — even though Germany itself shut down its last nuclear power plant in 2023.

A line item that gave away the plan

According to Welt, a new €4 billion entry surfaced during the Bundestag’s final deliberations on the 2027 draft budget, earmarked for acquiring stakes in energy-sector companies. Political sources told the paper it was intended for Urenco, though Germany’s finance and economy ministries would not say what the line item covers. The federal government, RWE and E.ON all declined to comment publicly on the reports, and no purchase agreement has been signed. Both the price and the closing timeline remain unconfirmed; the figures and the rationale below rest on German press reporting that has not been independently verified by Reuters or other wire services.

Why London wants Berlin to buy, not sell

Handelsblatt, citing government circles, reported that the request to buy came from London rather than Berlin: the UK reportedly asked Germany to take over the stake so it would not end up with an outside buyer, at a moment when Britain is leaning on Urenco to help modernise its nuclear deterrent. Urenco’s enrichment plant in Capenhurst, England, is one of the few Western facilities capable of producing fuel for military reactors, including the ones that power Britain’s nuclear submarines. Berlin has said it was informed of those plans and considers them compatible with the 1970 Treaty of Almelo, the founding agreement that limits Urenco strictly to civilian work and requires all three government shareholders to be consulted on ownership changes.

What RWE and E.ON are walking away from

Urenco is owned in equal thirds by the British and Dutch governments and by Uranit, a holding company jointly controlled by RWE and E.ON. RWE is no stranger to large-scale European energy deals this year: the company has also just reached financial close with KKR on a £12 billion UK offshore wind deal, a sign of how actively it is reshaping its portfolio across both renewables and legacy nuclear-adjacent holdings. Per Welt‘s reporting, the German utilities’ stake lost most of its strategic logic once Germany phased out nuclear power, while Urenco’s deepening role in military-adjacent fuel supply has made both companies increasingly uneasy about staying on as shareholders. RWE has said publicly it wants out; E.ON chief executive Leonhard Birnbaum has said any sale would first need government sign-off. This is not the first attempt to offload the stake — a previous sale process collapsed around 2015–2016 after reported interest from Russia’s Rosatom and France’s Areva was rejected on non-proliferation grounds, a precedent that helps explain why Berlin itself, rather than a private buyer, is now the preferred outcome.

Four plants, one Cold War treaty

Urenco runs centrifuge enrichment plants in Gronau (Germany), Almelo (Netherlands) and Capenhurst (England), plus a fourth in Eunice, New Mexico — the only commercial enrichment facility currently operating on US soil. Gronau was carved out of Germany’s own nuclear phase-out and holds an indefinite operating licence, underscoring how enrichment and reactor operation have been treated as separate questions even inside Germany’s anti-nuclear political consensus. For Western governments more broadly, taking a tighter grip on Urenco’s ownership fits a wider push since 2022 to reduce reliance on Russian-linked enrichment capacity for both civilian and allied military fuel needs — the same logic that has pushed buyers toward alternative suppliers such as Uzbekistan, which is targeting a doubling of its uranium output by 2030, and that led Urenco’s own US subsidiary to begin commercial production of higher-assay LEU+ fuel earlier this month.

Markets read the reports as a sign a deal is closer than usual: E.ON shares rose about 1.5% on Friday, among the bigger gainers on Germany’s DAX index, while RWE added roughly 0.3%. Even so, with the government, RWE and E.ON all staying silent on the record, the size, structure and timing of any transaction remain open questions heading into the Bundestag’s final 2027 budget votes.

Sources

• Oilprice.com, “Germany Eyes €4 Billion Buyout of RWE and E.ON’s Urenco Stake,” November 13, 2026 — deal value, market reaction, ownership structure. oilprice.com
• Welt, reported November 12, 2026 — original budget-line disclosure (via secondary reporting).
• Handelsblatt, reported November 13, 2026 — UK request to Berlin, military fuel context (via secondary reporting).
• Reuters, reported via MLQ.ai, November 13, 2026 — sourcing on draft purchase contract and closing timeline.

Illustrative image. Photo: Christian David, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source