Rotem Amfert Negev Ltd

Israel / Hadarom / Dimona /
 production, fertilizer plant
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The Negev Phosphates Chemicals Company at Mishor Rotem, located immediately adjacent to the Dimona reactor, is Israel's only acknowledged nuclear fuel cycle facility.
Rotem Amfert Negev is an integrated, multinational phosphate group manufacturing and marketing a comprehensive range of products based on phosphate rock as raw material and leading to downstream derivatives including phosphoric acids, fertilizers, specialty chemicals and phosphate salts. The Rotem's production capacity includes 1.8 million tpa of fertilizers, 540,000 tpa of P2O5 fertilizer grade phosphoric acid, more than 100,000 tpa (as P2O5) of food grade phosphoric acid, 4 million tpa of phosphate rock, and about 50,000 tpa MKP (monopotassium phosphate).
Israel can extract uranium from Negev phosphate deposits, and it is estimated that thirty to sixty thousand tons of uranium are contained in low-level phosphate ores. However, it is reported that domestic production of uranium as a by-product of phosphate mining amounts to only 10 tons a year. The amount of natural uranium per cycle is about 170 Mt in a standard 3,000 MWt power PWR. The power level of the Dimona reactor is variously estimated at between 30 MWt and 200 MWt, suggesting a requirement for Israel is said to have addressed this shortfall by reprocessing the low burnup spent fuel from Dimona to recover uranium (most other countries do not do this).
An unrelated compnay, Haifa Chemicals, established a plant at the Mishor Rotem industrial zone in the Negev Desert in 1994, in addition to its main facility in Haifa. In addition to potassium nitrate, Haifa Chemicals manufactures and distributes a broad variety of products based on potassium nitrate and phosphoric acid. The company is wholly owned by the multinational US-based Trans-Resources Inc.
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Coordinates:   31°4'3"N   35°12'0"E
This article was last modified 12 years ago