Orano Brand Guidelines: New Areva’s 2018 Name, a Yellow Circle & the Fuel Cycle

A fuel-cycle company carved from a troubled giant.

Orano is a new name on old industry. Its roots go back to 1976, when the production division of France’s atomic energy commission, the CEA, became the Compagnie générale des matières nucléaires, or COGEMA, English Wikipedia says. In 2001 COGEMA merged with the reactor maker Framatome and CEA Industrie to form Areva, for two decades one of the largest companies in nuclear energy.

After years of losses Areva was split in two and recapitalised in 2017, NucNet reported in January 2018. Its reactor business, New NP, was sold to EDF and renamed Framatome in January 2018. The fuel-cycle businesses — mining, conversion, enrichment, recycling, logistics, decommissioning and engineering — had been grouped in a new company called New Areva, and on 23 January 2018 it was renamed Orano. Chief executive Philippe Knoche said a new name and logo were needed to start another chapter, NucNet reported, and Claude Imauven became chairman, French Wikipedia says.

The ownership was settled at the same time. The French State holds the majority, and on 27 January 2018 the entry of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited, each with five per cent, took effect, French Wikipedia says. At the end of 2019 the group left the Areva tower at La Défense for Châtillon, in the Hauts-de-Seine, where it is based today.

Ouranos, a yellow circle and the cycle.

The name and the mark were chosen to explain the business. Orano comes from Ouranos, the Greek sky god whose Roman counterpart Uranus gave his name to the planet and, later, to uranium, French Wikipedia says. The logo is a yellow circle: French Wikipedia says the yellow was chosen for the colour of uranium ore and the circular form refers to the cycle of the group’s work, including the recycling of used fuel, while English Wikipedia links the yellow to yellowcake, the uranium concentrate the company produces. The identity was entrusted to the brand-design agency Insign, French Wikipedia says.

The business behind the mark runs along the fuel chain. Orano Mining has worked in Canada, through interests at McClean Lake and Cigar Lake, and in Kazakhstan, through the Katco joint venture with Kazatomprom. Conversion and enrichment take place at Malvési and Tricastin, where the Philippe Coste conversion plant opened in 2018 and the board approved an expansion of the Georges-Besse II enrichment plant in 2023. Used fuel is recycled at La Hague in Normandy and the Melox plant in the Gard, and the Orano TN subsidiary transports and stores nuclear materials, with systems such as NUHOMS, all according to English Wikipedia.

Not every project went ahead. In September 2018 the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission terminated Orano’s licence to build the Eagle Rock enrichment plant in Idaho, a project suspended since December 2011, English Wikipedia says. In January 2025 the group signed an agreement with the Mongolian government to develop the Zuuvch-Ovoo uranium deposit in the Gobi.

Design and documentation.

Nuclear companies sell to a small number of buyers — utilities, governments and regulators — over very long timescales, and their imagery tends to reflect that. Corporate pages and reports often return to the same few scenes: cooling towers and reactor domes photographed under clear skies, turbine halls in clean, even light, and wide views of plants set against water or open country.

Newer reactor designers, many of which have not yet built a commercial plant, lean on renders instead. Small modular plants appear as low, compact buildings in green landscapes, sometimes beside a town or a data centre, with no smoke and few people. Large-reactor vendors show construction sites, cranes and heavy components such as reactor vessels and steam generators on the move, a way of picturing scale and progress at once.

People appear mostly as engineers in hard hats and overalls, inspecting a weld, reading a control-room screen or handling fuel. Two images recur across the trade: the blue Cherenkov glow of a spent-fuel or research-reactor pool, caused by charged particles travelling through water faster than light does in it, and ceramic fuel pellets held in a gloved hand. Both are used to make an invisible process visible.

The industry also presents itself in person, at trade gatherings such as the World Nuclear Exhibition and the meetings of the American Nuclear Society, where stands, renders and scale models carry much of the message. The companies in this guide range from Framatome, founded in 1958, and Urenco, set up by treaty in the early 1970s, to much younger reactor designers, and their visual languages vary just as widely.

Niger, Somaïr and a loss of control.

Orano’s longest-running chapter outside France has been in Niger, and recent years changed it sharply. Somaïr, the Société des Mines de l’Aïr, is a joint venture formed in 1968 that began operating at Arlit, in the Agadez region, in 1971; Orano held 63.4 per cent and Niger’s state mining company Sopamin 36.6 per cent, World Nuclear News and Nuclear Engineering International reported, and in 2025 it operated Niger’s only working uranium mine. After a military government took power in Niger in 2023, relations with France deteriorated. In June 2024 Niger withdrew Orano’s rights to the Imouraren deposit, English Wikipedia says, and in December 2024 Orano reported that it had lost control of its three Nigerien subsidiaries, Somaïr, Cominak and Imouraren.

Orano opened international arbitration over Imouraren in December 2024 and over Somaïr in January 2025, and began further proceedings in May 2025 after security services raided its offices in Niamey and arrested the head of Orano Mining Niger, World Nuclear News reported in June 2025. On 19 June 2025 Niger’s government announced it would nationalise Somaïr, alleging that Orano had taken a disproportionate share of its output; Orano condemned the move and said it would seek full compensation. In September 2025 a tribunal at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes issued an interim order barring Niger from selling or transferring uranium mined before operations were suspended, Nuclear Engineering International reported in October 2025, noting that a final decision could take months or years. The stakes were large: the same report said Niger’s mines had supplied about 15 per cent of Orano’s uranium when running at full capacity, and that in 2022 Niger provided more than a quarter of the uranium used in the European Union, according to Euratom.

For a design guide, Orano shows how a rename can carry a whole explanation of a business in one word and one colour. Compare Framatome, the reactor business split from the same Areva group, and Mitsubishi, whose heavy-industry arm became a shareholder. For this guide we use a warm yellow, ochre and graphite with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Orano’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.