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