Unit 4 of the Shin Kori Nuclear Power Plant was connected to the electricity grid on April 22, Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power annou...
Kazakhstan, the world’s largest producer of uranium, is looking at scaling up its supply of uranium to India from 5,000 tonnes d...
The first Japanese nuclear power plant to be restarted after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident risks being shut down again after...
The Mineral Council of Australia (MCA) is calling on the federal government to repeal a decades old nuclear energy ban on the cont...
The Japanese-French consortium that agreed to build a nuclear power plant in Turkey is set to abandon the project, a former nuclea...
A US Senate hearing will be held next week on a bill that would restart the licensing process to build a permanent nuclear waste f...
Uranium Primer - Uranium as Nuclear Fuel
Uranium in its naturally occurring form consists primarily of two “isotopes” with the same chemical characteristics, but different atomic weights due to the differing number of neutrons in their nuclei. Both isotopes have 92 protons in their nuclei (and, thus, the same chemical characteristics), but the lighter isotope (atomic weight of 235) has 143 neutrons and the heavier isotope has 146 neutrons. The lighter isotope, U-235, comprises only 0.7% of natural uranium, but it is the only isotope that can actually undergo fission and, thus, produce energy. The other isotope, U-238, comprises the remaining 99.3% of natural uranium. In order to be useful as fuel in the most prevalent nuclear power technologies, the percentage of U-235 must be increased to the level of 2-5% U-235, a process called “enrichment.” Enrichment is a technically difficult process, the essence of which is highly secret because it is the same process used to produce some nuclear weapons material. (Nuclear weapons can be made from uranium of approximately 90% U-235.)
