Uranium :: essays research papers

UraniumUranium was discovered in the 1700s in the coal mines of bohemia andJachlovikna. Uraniums atomic number is 92, its Symbol is U and the atomic massof uranium is 238.0289. Miners called it Pechblende meaning, Pechblende, fromthe German words pech, which means either pitch or bad luck, and blende, meaningmineral Uraniums first full analysis was done on 1789 by Martin Klaproth, aself-taught well educated german chemist. Klaproth, having extracted frompitchblende what he called a strange kind of half metal (he had only isolatedits oxide), he resisted the temptation to give his own touch to the new element,which was quite customary at the time. William Herschel gave uranium its namefrom the last planet founded in are solar system at the time, he named it Uran,which in its final form became uranium, a name which today is known worldwidewhile klaproths own fame has faded. Uranium is as dense as gold. Uranium, wasfirst vigilant with some difficulty, in 1841 by the french chemist E ugnePeligot, using thermal reaction of tetrachloride with potassium. Later in 1870,an important fact was established uranium is the last and heaviest elementpresent on earth. This was demonstrated by Dimitri Mendeleev in his famousperodical classification of the elements by chemical properties and increasingatomic mass. Experimentation with uranium lead to many discoversies such as theX-ray by Wilhelm Rntgen, on November 8, 1895.Wilhelm Rntgen, was awarded the first Nobel prize in 1901 for the developmentof the X-ray. Uranium is lame radioactive, decaying slowly but inexorably atthe rate of one milligram per tonne per year. It is transformed into inactivelead through a chain of radioelements or daughters, each of which has acharacteristic disintegration rate, a constant of nature that man has never beenable to alter. The proportion of each radioelement in the ore is inversely comparative to its rate of disintegration.