9781422279526

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Uranium

at this site. One hundred years after the mine prospered, it was nearly abandoned . . . but not closed. Deposits of bismuth and cobalt contin- ued and, as technology and mining techniques improved, more silver was extracted from the mine. The miners also reported the presence of a shiny black mineral. They gave that black mineral the nickname “pitchblende” which means “bad luck mineral” in German. The Element Gets a Name In 1789, a German chemist named Martin Klaproth analyzed a sample of pitchblende. During his chemical experiments, he assumed the mineral was made of a pure element. He named the element “ura- nium.” At a time when many of the newly discovered elements were named after the scientists who discovered them, Martin Klaproth took a different approach. Instead of potentially giving us the element “Klaprothium,” he named his newly discovered element uranium. Ura- nium is named for the planet Uranus, which in turn, was named for Uranus the Greek God of the Sky. Uranus had been discovered in 1781. As it turned out, pitchblende is not pure uranium—it is a compound of uranium and oxygen, a mineral called uranium dioxide (UO 2 ).

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