Things you should know

           THING YOU SHOULD KNOW 

Uranium 

To find answers, to trace history. 

Welcome to my blog. Today this blog is about the stuff we should know. so today I am talking about uranium mining. Uranium mining is like its own thing, it is particularly heavy and regulated. the stuff that it produces uranium appropriately enough is a really regulated substance because it can produce some pretty powerful stuff and it's just kind of interesting especially considering the history of uranium in humans. fairly recent history. if you are talking about during 50,s cold war, you can only think about uranium in nuclear war and a nuclear bomb.  if you fast forward to the '70s you think about the kind of gentler uranium still radioactive but one that would be used for energy production. A 7-gram pellet of uranium fuel produces as much energy as almost 1800 pounds of coal. 

if you took about 75kg of enriched uranium fuel, it would produce the same amount of energy as almost  2 million pounds of coal. That's because uranium is radioactive.  it decays spontaneously over time and when it does, it releases gamma radiation and energy in the form of heat and if you can contain and encourage this decay these reactions will neutrons will bombard uranium atoms and create all source of energy release and it happens like trillions of times a second, you can generate enough heat to boil water to spin a turbine. Using nuclear fuel to generate steam to turn a turbine to produce electricity is an amazing process. Typically the nuclear fuel enriched uranium that we use in a nuclear reactor to create electricity is about 5% of uranium 235 that's the many isotopes when you are creating nuclear power. If you are using it for military purposes like nuclear bomb it's like 90% so you can get a lot of nuclear fuel out of uranium that was enriched for a nuclear bomb and reusing it for nuclear fuel.

It can also be used for other stuff and not just for making power. There is something called MOLYBDENUM. This is a decay product of uranium and it is really useful for medical imaging like to see if your heart is pumping correctly or to see if your cancer is metastasized. There are nuclear reactors that produce electricity that doesn't have to use enriched uranium, they can actually use natural uranium ore and still generate electricity.  If we can get away from nuclear enrichment and not to that anymore, it would save a lot of problems because nuclear in itself is problematic. there is a lot of problems with by-products and the enrichment process. Another fact about uranium when it was first discovered as well as radium for early uses, Radium was used to make glow paint, and uranium was used as a decorative glaze. 

There is another thing called vaseline glass which is a collector's item but it has a radioactive glow to it because it has uranium in it. So uranium was discovered in 1789 by a subject of the kingdom of Bohemia, which is presently in the Czech Republic. His name was Martin Heinrich Klaproth. He was a German Chemist, he renamed it after the name of planet Uranus which was discovered 8 years earlier than uranium. There are different kinds of Uranium, it has different kinds of isotopes which basically are the different forms with different numbers of neutrons depending on how stable the isotope is. Some are more radioactive and some are more likely to produce nuclear fission some are less likely. Uranium 235 and uranium 238 are called primordial elements, so the uranium around on earth is is way older than earth. If you take a half gram of uranium 238 and store it in a container and you come back and check on it, in 4.5 billion years only half of it would be decayed. It is quite ancient stuff. 

If you want to mine uranium. Australia is number 1 in the world because about 30% of the uranium in the world is present in Australia. Kazakistan is on number second, number 3 in Russia, and number 4 in Canada. Canada has got the number 1 producing mine called Cigar Lake mine, it produces like 13% of the world's uranium singlehandedly in 2019. Canada's uranium is so rich that they have to use robots to mine it because the humans can't get near to it because it is too dangerous. The US doesn't have the ton of it. There are probably 6 states in the US that have mining operations Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah have the bulk of it and there is also Arizona, Nebraska, and Texas and Arizona is interesting because there is a Grand Canyon Natural Park, there is Uranium.  

The United States and Russia were really moving fast to get as much Uranium as possible during the world war. At that time every country was looking whether they had uranium deposits or not. Uranium 235 was as well used as the nuclear core for the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. It takes few people to mine but it's also a very big process which takes upto10-15 years of time. If you are a uranium miner then you are not just an ordinary miner because you will be specially trained to recognize uranium. Open-pit and strip mining are two types of mining processes out of many others. Then there is also underground mining which goes deeper than the other two, it is way more labor extensive and much more costly, and also a bit more dangerous and higher health risks. 

So, this was some information about uranium that you should know if you are into nuclear power and other kinds of stuff like it. If you found this article helpful then kindly share it with others and drop a comment if there are any suggestions. See you with a new article on a new thing which I think you should know about.

 Thank you.