Uranium ore deposits / Месторождения урановых руд

The discovery of uranium is attributed to Klaproth, a German chemist who, in 1789, precipitated a yellow compound by dissolving pitchblende in nitric acid, neutralizing it with sodium hydroxide, and heating it with charcoal to obtain a black powder that was uranium oxide. He named the newly discovered element after the planet Uranus. In 1841, Pe´ligot, a French chemist working at the Baccarat crystal factory in Lorraine, isolated the first sample of uranium metal by heating uranium tetrachloride with potassium. Uranium was used during the nineteenth century to color pottery and glass until the discovery of radioactivity by Becquerel in 1896 (Becquerel, 1896), when he accidentally exposed a photographic plate to uranium. A team led by Enrico Fermi in 1934 observed that bombarding uranium with neutrons produces the emission of beta rays, and this led to the discovery of fission of uranium by the Fermi group on 2 December 1942 – the era of the power of the atom began <...>