This guide will teach you how to get the uranium isotopes needed to build your very first reactor/bomb.
Concept[]
Uranium can be enriched by turning it into hexafluoride gas and seperating the U235 from the heavier U238 in a centrifuge. In order to make uranium hexafluoride, the uranium has to be cleaned (by treating it with acid, thus creating an intermediate product called "yellowcake", a yellowish, radioactive powder) and combined with fluorine, which comes from fluorite mineral.
Visualisation[]
This graphic shows all the resources and processing steps required to turn basic ore into uranium 235 and 238.
The complete process requires four resources:
- Uranium
- Sulfur
- Fluorite
- Water
There are also two machines involved:
- Chemical Plant
- Centrifuge
Note: There's a third machine required for obtaining uranium powder, either being the shredder or the cyclotron. Due to the amount of possible ways to obtain uranium powder, the step required to get it is only hinted at.
In order to make one nugget of fissile uranium, following items are required:
- Uranium Powder (1x)
- Sulfur Powder (2x)
- Fluorite Powder (3x)
- Water (1000mB)
- Hydrogen Peroxide (500mB, ≙1000mB of Water)
While this sounds a lot to get a tiny piece of fissile material, keep in mind that a basic uranium fuel rod (composed of only three U235 nuggets) can create 100HE/tick for 10k ticks, that's 333333 HE per nugget, one third of a million HE.
Warning: Items in this production chain can be radioactive, wearing a hazmat suit is advised.