Meet Isaac, he is an isotope of the element uranium (specifically U-235). Right now he's just a rock in the ground. But eventually, he will become the fuel that can lead us to a better future.

Isaac's journey starts with a miner in Utah. Isaac is excavated out of the ground and his journey begins.

Isaac is then sent over to a uranium milling facility where a worker grinds him down into a fine powder. The worker then adds chemicals to the powder which causes a reaction that separates uranium from the other minerals.

Fun fact: although the concentrated uranium product is typically a black or brown substance, it is called yellowcake

Isaac next step in his adventure is to be sent to a converter facility. Here, he is turned into uranium hexafluoride gas (UF₆).

After conversion, Isaac is sent to an enrichment plant where individual uranium isotopes are separated to create enriched UF₆. Enriched UF₆ is sealed in canisters and allowed to cool and solidify.

At a nuclear fuel fabrication facility, Isaac is heated up to become  a gas again. The gas is then chemically processed to form uranium dioxide powder. The powder is then compressed and formed into small ceramic fuel pellets. 

The pellets are stacked and sealed into long metal tubes to form fuel rods. The fuel rods are bundled up to form fuel assemblies. Each assembly will have about  179 to 264 fuel rods.

Hi new friends!

Trucks transport Isaac and his new friends to the reactor sites. They are stored onsite in fresh fuel storage bins until the reactor operators need them. after about 16 months they finally enter the core.

Isaac takes a look around, the reactor core is a cylindrical arrangement of the fuel bundles that is about 12 feet in diameter and 14 feet tall and encased in a steel pressure vessel with walls that are several inches thick.