Uranium is mined as ore in Canada, Russia, Australia, Kazakhstan and perhaps soon in the south of Greenland. The ore is crushed and milled; the uranium is leached out with acid, converted to a gas, enriched, consolidated and then processed into pellets. A single pellet of enriched uranium one centimetre in diameter and one centimetre long will typically release the same amount of energy as a ton of coal. Those pellets are sealed within gleaming fuel rods, usually made of zirconium alloy, which are bundled together in their thousands and then placed in the reactor core, where fission is
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