Uranium Essay, Research Paper

Chapter 1

Locations

Large deposits of Uranium in the U.S are found in

New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. Most

of Canada?s Uranium comes from the province of

Saskatchewan. There is a lot of Uranium in the oceans but

we do not have the technology to mine it at a cheap cost.

Chapter 2

Mining

When uranium is extracted, pitchblende is broken up

and mixed with sulfuric and nitric acids. It then dissolves

into uranyl sulfate. With the addition of sodium hydroxide,

uranium is precipitated as sodium diuranate which is

known as the yellow oxide of uranium. To get uranium

from carnotite, the ore must be finely ground and treated

with a hot solution of caustic and potash to dissolve out the

uranium, radium, and vanadium. And after the sandy matrix

is washed away, the solution is treated with sulfuric acid

and barium chloride. A caustic alkali solution is then added

to the remaining clear liquid precipitates the uranium and

radium into concentrated form.

Chapter 3

Properties

Uranium will melt at 1132 degrees Celsius, and boils

at about 3818 degrees Celsius. Its atomic weight is 238.029

and its atomic number is 92.

Chapter 4

Uses

Uranium several uses, it is used in nuclear weapons

and in nuclear power plants. They used uranium in 1954

for the first nuclear powered submarine in the U.S.

Chapter 5

History

Uranium was discovered in 1789 in pitchblende by a

German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth who named it

after the planet Uranus. The radioactive properties of

uranium were first showed in 1896 when a French physicist

Antoine Henri Becquerel produced an image on a

photographic plate covered with a light-absorbing

substance.