Fuel Cycle
The government has set a target of producing 350 tonnes (U3O8)per year from 2015 to meet one third of anticipated requirements then. Low grade Ore is known in central Punjab Province at Bannu Basin and Suleman Range.
A small (15,000 SWU/yr) uranium centrifuge enrichment plant at Kahuta has been operated by the KRL since 1984 and does not have any apparent civil use. It was expanded threefold about 1991. A newer plant is reported to be at Gadwal which is operated by PAEC. The plant is not under safeguards of IAEA.
In 2006, the PAEC announced that it was preparing to set up separate and purely civil conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication plants as a new US$ 1.2 billion Nuclear Power Fuel Complex which would be under IAEA safeguards and managed separately from existing facilities. At least the enrichment plant would be built at Chak Jhumra, Faisalabad, in the Punjab and have a 150,000 SWU/yr capacity in five years — about 2013, then be expanded in 150,000 SWU increments to be able to supply one third of the enrichment requirements for a planned 8800 MWe generating capacity by 2030.
Read more about this topic: Nuclear Energy In Pakistan
Famous quotes containing the words fuel and/or cycle:
“I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice,—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,... if it was dull, it was at least hung true.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)