Nuclear Fuel Chain

Finding uranium deposits is the first activity, which leads to registering a company, getting approvals and beginning to mine. Once the ore body is dug out of the ground, it is milled (crushed) to extract the uranium. This phase produces mountains of unwanted tailings (leftovers), which are costly to contain effectively, and often tailings dams are breached e.g. at Ranger mine in Northern Territory, very heavy rains during the wet season will send thousands of litres of contaminated water into the Kakadu waterways.

Untraceable uranium in a process fraught with risk

The next link in the chain is transport, which in Australia involves rail, then shipping to overseas clients. Upon arrival the yellowcake must be enriched to hexafluoride gas, and packed into fuel pellets, which are fed into the reactor, in the process usually mixing with oxide from other sources, so the Australian uranium cannot be traced. The reactor core heats and a fission chain reaction takes place, producing huge amounts of heat. The reactor has probably taken over a decade to build, and involves very delicate practices to ensure that the whole system doesn’t overheat. The spent fuel rods are stored in cooling ponds before removal, for interim storage or to be reprocessed.

Feeding the war machine

Around a third of the world’s spent fuel is reprocessed; plutonium is extracted from them, and siphoned off into nuclear weapons manufacture or mixed-oxide fuel. De-commissioning of reactors too radioactive to function anymore is a huge problem. High level radioactive waste is not safely or permanently stored anywhere in the world; it is just mounting up with nowhere to go.