The quest for clean energy has turned human attention to the earth’s core that has deep reserves of uranium, an element that powers nuclear reactors. With scientific advances in the production of nuclear energy, the engineering capability to reach deep below the earth’s crust to extract this element has also improved. However, that was not always the case.

In popular imagination, Uranium is a destructive force used to make nuclear bombs but in reality, it is a vital industrial element used in a wide variety of applications such as X-ray production, in gyroscopes and even as a shield against radiation.

Uranium is a hard, silvery and shiny metal that is radioactive. The earth has abundant sources of this metal almost everywhere: soil, rocks, rivers, even oceans. In fact, the earth’s crust has more of this element than gold or silver. Not just that, there’s 0.0001 mg of the stuff in the human body! Despite the abundance what makes it so valuable is the difficulty in its exploration, extraction and processing.