Essay/Term paper: Uranium

Essay, term paper, research paper:  English

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.