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Isru Refinery
The In-Situ Resource Refinery is a wonder of compact technology. It has three uses:
You can use an ISRU Refinery to turn your Actinide waste back into nuclear fuel. 80% of the Actinide waste becomes new fuel, either UF4 or ThF4 and the remaining 20% becomes DepletedFuels. You must have somewhere to store the DepletedFuels in order to conduct fuel reprocessing.
Electrolysis has a variety of functions depending upon the location in which you make use of it. When splashed down in ocean, you can use the option to produce Hydrogen and Oxygen (LiquidFuel and Oxidiser) from the water in the ocean.
Likewise, when landed on the water-ice surface of Vall, operation is the same as above.
On Duna, electrolysis of water can also be performed but the water must also be baked out of the soil before the electrolysis can take place, this increases the energy cost of producing each ton of fuel by around 25% and consequently slows the process.
On the Mun, Ike and Tylo, you will instead use Electrolysis to produce Aluminum and Oxygen from the local crust. This will provide fuel for the Aluminum Hybrid Rocket.
Discovered by Paul Sabatier in 1910, this chemical reaction combines hydrogen and carbon dioxide gas at high temperature and in the presence of a nickel or ruthenium catalyst to produce methane and water. As the atmosphere of Duna consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide gas, you can refill a methane/oxidizer tank on Duna, provided you've brought along a suitable supply of hydrogen gas.
At present the water is not available separately. It is instead electrolyzed, allowing the oxygen to be used as oxidizer and the hydrogen to be run automatically through the Sabatier process again to produce methane.
Dig Uranium or Thorium out of the ground and process it until useable UF4 or ThF4 fuel. The rate at which the resources are extracted depends on the abundance of the resource in the area.
Nuclear resource abundances can measured with a [Gamma Ray Spectrometer](Gamma Ray Spectrometer).