Currently, I have Schall Uranium Processing handling this part. The overall chain is like this:
The modified enrichment and Kovarex recipes can turn U-238 (Renamed as Depleted uranium, DU by the mod) to Low enriched uranium (LEU) to finally U-235 (Renamed as Highly-enriched uranium, HEU). Then U-235 (or HEU) + Alien artifact gives iron/copper ore.
Simply to say, the setup is to require converting DU into HEU first (or to say as: U-238 to U-235).
The overall conversion (disregarding energy consumption) is:
123 DU → 41× LEU → 3× HEU
Looking at the conversion ratios, it is VERY effective to get rid of U-238 / DU.
(And I am careful in assigning values to still fitting both the vanilla Kovarex conversion ratio and realistic uranium concentrations.)
The product U-235 / HEU can then be converted to iron/copper ore as the recipe you mentioned.
The above recipe set already did the job for getting rid of U-238 / DU, so I am not too fond of introducing another recipe for that.