The Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) is a central Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) under the administrative control of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). It was incorporated on October 4, 1967, with the primary purpose of mining and processing uranium ore to fuel India's nuclear power program. The creation of UCIL was essential to ensure a domestic supply of uranium, which is a "prescribed substance" under Section 3 of the Atomic Energy Act, 1962, vesting its exclusive control in the Union government.
UCIL operates as the sole domestic uranium miner, giving it an effective monopoly over the front-end of the nuclear fuel cycle in India. Its mechanism involves taking over proven reserves from the Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research (AMD), then sinking underground or opening opencast mines, such as the first one at Jaduguda in Jharkhand, commissioned in 1967. The extracted low-grade ore is then processed in mills, like those at Jaduguda and Tummalapalle, where it is crushed, leached, and precipitated into an intermediate concentrate known as "yellow cake". This concentrate is then sent to the Nuclear Fuel Complex (NFC) in Hyderabad for purification and fabrication into fuel assemblies for the Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) operated by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL).
UCIL is connected to the broader Indian nuclear establishment, including the DAE, AMD, NFC, and NPCIL, all of which operate within the framework of the Atomic Energy Act, 1962. In recent years, UCIL has been actively expanding its operations, with new projects planned in states like Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, and it is also setting up a recovery plant in Jharkhand to extract uranium from the tailings of Hindustan Copper Limited to augment domestic supply. Furthermore, there have been discussions about potential amendments to the atomic energy bill that may reserve uranium mining exclusively for government companies, reinforcing UCIL's role.