Uranium :: essays research papers

uracilUranium was discovered in the 1700s in the coal mines of bohemia andJachlovikna. Uraniums atomic add together is 92, its Symbol is U and the atomic massof uranium is 238.0289. Miners called it Pechblende meaning, Pechblende, fromthe German speech communication 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 miscellanea of half metal (he had only isolatedits oxide), he resisted the temptation to give his hold call up 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 like a shot is known worldwidewhile klaproths own fame has faded. Uranium is as complicated as gold. Uranium, wasfirst prepared with so me difficulty, in 1841 by the French chemist EugnePeligot, using thermal reaction of tetrachloride with potassium. Later in 1870,an important fact was established uranium is the last and heaviest element limn 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 some(prenominal) 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 slow but inexorably atthe rate of one milligram per thymine per year. It is transformed into inactivelead through a chain of radioelements or daughters, each of which has acharacteristic disintegration rate, a constant of personality that man has never beenable to alter. The proportion of each radioelement in the ore is mutuallyproportional to its rate of disintegration .