Fuel Rod

alaindustrial:uranium_fuel_rod

NuclearImplementednuclearreactorfueluranium

Summary

The Fuel Rod is the reactor's only fuel and the end of the mod's uranium chain. It is assembled from a fuel rod cladding and one enriched uranium, goes into a reactor column by right-clicking — one at a time, up to four per rack — and gives up exactly 144,000 EU/FE there, after which it is an empty casing again.

It is the first and so far only consumer of refined_uranium. The mod has produced enriched uranium since, and until stage 2 of the epic not one recipe spent it: the long ore → dust → concentrate → enriched uranium chain ended in an item with nowhere to go.

Two-step fuel — and why not enriched uranium directly

The reactor could burn refined_uranium straight away, one step shorter. That is deliberately not

• A rack holds rods, not ingots. The fuel here is physical: it is visible inside the transparent rack, and "four rods" reads as an object where "four ingots in a rack" does not.
• The shielding plate in the recipe is the sheath. It is the same material the room is built from; the connection needs no explaining to the player.
• The step leaves room to grow. MOX, depleted uranium and other grades of rod fit the same shape without touching ore processing.
• And the same step is what makes the casing reusable. The sheath can come back; the uranium pellet cannot. Without this step, refuelling a reactor would cost exactly what the first load did (see the fuel rod cladding).

How it burns

A rod is an amount of energy, not a duration. It yields 144,000 EU/FE in every layout: the adjacency bonus buys power (the rod burns faster), the HV ceiling buys autonomy (the rod lasts longer), but what is inside it never changes. The previous edition promised "1,152,000 x adjacency multiplier" per column — that is, dense packing produced fuel out of nothing. Stage 4 closed it.

The full breakdown with numbers is in

Control-rod depth is a throttle, not a discount: at 50 % a rod gives half the EU/FE per tick, half the heat and is consumed half as fast. Running gently stretches the uranium over time rather than wasting it — the total EU/FE in a rod depends on nothing at all.

Durability IS the remaining charge

The rod has a durability bar, and it means literally what it shows: how much energy is left in it. The scale is 1000 points, each worth 144 EU/FE. Half a bar is half a charge.

A thousand points rather than 144,000, because a bar sixteen pixels wide cannot show more anyway; a round number also reads — "damage 250" is exactly a quarter spent. It is also independent of the config: a server operator can raise, the rod gets roomier, and a full bar still means "untouched".

The controller spends energy in ticks of a few dozen EU/FE while a point costs 144, so the remainder is carried: the column banks the unspent draw and takes a point off once it adds up to a whole one. Without the carry the rod would never wear at all — every tick would round to zero. The arithmetic is covered by tests and needs no game session to verify.

The price of a point rounds up: with a truncating divide each point would cost slightly less than it yields, and the last few points would be free energy.

A half-burnt rod comes back

It used to not. A started rod could not be taken out, it did not drop when the rack was broken, and "just have a look at what is in there" was an expensive mistake. There was one reason: the remaining burn lived in the rack's block entity, so a returned item would come back full, which would make "pull it out and put it back" a perpetual reactor.

Since stage 4 the remainder lives on the item itself, so there is nothing left to throw away:

• right-clicking empty-handed hands the rod back with all its durability;
• breaking the column (a creeper included) drops everything racked, half-burnt rods among it;
• a rod put back in carries on from where it stopped.

A burnt-out rod does not vanish — it becomes a fuel rod cladding right where it stands. There is still no depleted rod on the output: depleted_uranium exists in the mod and arrives by another route (mutation); wiring it to the reactor is an open question.

Recipes

• Craft — shapeless, x1 at a time.

fuel rod cladding + enriched uranium -> fuel rod

Two items in any cells of the grid. Refuelling happens dozens of rods at a time, and a full 3x3 layout for each one would be a punishment for scale. The item's shape is the business of the cladding's recipe — that one is a full 3x3, and it is done once.

The chain from ore to rod

The result: one uranium ore = two rods, exactly, with no remainder and no rounding. Processing costs 2,420 EU/FE per ore = 1,210 EU/FE per rod; the first assembly adds the casing on top (~400 EU/FE for the shielding plate, plus iron) — ~1,610 EU/FE. On a refill the casing is already there, and the rod costs only its own 1,210 EU/FE and half an ore.

A shielding plate is a third of a palladium ingot and one tempered iron ingot, plus a hit from the forge hammer. Palladium is mined in the Nether alone, so the reactor is out of reach until that trip however many chests of uranium are on hand — but only once: casings come back.

Progression

• Tier: none (the item carries no energy; the reactor it feeds is HV).
• Needs: refined_uranium (uranium + thermal centrifuge + compressor) and a fuel rod cladding — that is palladium, and therefore the Nether.
• Unlocks: output from the reactor room. An empty room is a diagnostic device; rods make it a generator.
• Growth: MOX and other grades of rod are outside this epic (see `FUTURE_CONTENT.md`, fuel_rod_mox).

Related

• Fuel Rod Cladding — the casing it is built from and turns back into.
• Reactor Column — where it goes and how it wears down.
• Reactor Controller — what burns it and what it becomes.
• Thermal Centrifuge and Compressor — the two machines that make enriched uranium.
• Macerator — the start of the chain, ore into dust.

Crafting

Shapeless Crafting

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Fuel Rod