Uranium is a naturally occurring radioactive metal, atomic number 92, that supplies the fissile material burned in nuclear power reactors worldwide. The German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth identified it as a new element in Berlin in 1789, naming it for the recently discovered planet Uranus; for more than a century afterward it was valued chiefly for coloring glass and ceramic glazes, since its capacity to release energy through nuclear fission was not understood until the twentieth century. Natural uranium is a metal about as common in the Earth's crust as tin or zinc, though only its uranium-235 isotope, roughly 0.7 percent of the natural mix, sustains the chain reaction that heats water into steam inside a reactor; most commercial fuel is enriched to raise that share. Australia, Kazakhstan and Canada lead world uranium production today.
Facts
Source Class First Commercial YearChicago Pile-1, fueled by natural uranium and graphite, achieved the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago on 2 December 1942, but generated no usable power. The first uranium-fueled reactor to deliver electricity to a public grid was the Obninsk plant in the Soviet Union in June 1954; Calder Hall in England, 1956, is often cited as the first industrial-scale nuclear station, the same distinction this atlas records for Nuclear Power itself. Connections
Associated With
Energy Density, Concepts Uranium's energy density per unit mass runs into the millions relative to coal or oil, the extreme case the concept is most often illustrated with.
Source World Nuclear Association Information Library
Source World Nuclear Association Information Library
Sources
1. World Nuclear Association Information Library
World Nuclear AssociationSupply of Uranium
Uranium is a relatively common element in the crust of the Earth (very much more than in the mantle). It is a metal approximately as common as tin or zinc.
Revival of the nuclear boiler
in June 1954 the world's first nuclear powered electricity generator began operation at the FEI in Obninsk.
Associated With: Thorium, Current and Future Generation, Thorium
Also, uranium is abundant and cheap and forms only a small part of the cost of nuclear electricity generation, so there are no real incentives for investment in a new fuel type.
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Wikimedia FoundationHistory, Discovery
While he was working in his experimental laboratory in Berlin in 1789, Klaproth was able to precipitate a yellow compound.
History, Fission research
On 2 December 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, another team led by Enrico Fermi was able to initiate the first artificial self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, Chicago Pile-1.
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