Uranium :: essays research papers

uracilatomic number 92 was discovered in the 1700s in the scorch mines of bohemia andJachlovikna. Uraniums atomic number is 92, its Symbol is U and the atomic massof uracil is 238.0289. Miners called it Pechblende meaning, Pechblende, fromthe German words pech, which means either pitch or fully grown luck, and blende, meaningmineral Uraniums first full analysis was d superstar 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 enticement to give his own name to the new element,which was quite customary at the time. William Herschel gave uranium its namefrom the demise 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 prepared with some difficulty, in 1841 by the french chemist EugnePeligot, using thermal chemical 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 noteworthyperodical 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 weakly 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, for each one 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 inverselyproportional to its rate of disintegration.