Uranium

In the Middle Ages, the mineral pitchblende (uranium oxide, U3O8) sometimes turned up in silver mines, and in 1789
Martin Heinrich Klaproth of Berlin investigated it. He dissolved it in nitric acid and precipitated a yellow compound
when the solution was neutralised. He realised it was the oxide of a new element and tried to produce the metal itself
by heating the precipitate with charcoal, but failed.

It fell to Eugène Peligot in Paris to isolate the first sample of uranium metal which he did in 1841, by heating uranium
tetrachloride with potassium.

The discovery that uranium was radioactive came only in 1896 when Henri Becquerel in Paris left a sample of
uranium on top of an unexposed photographic plate. It caused this to become cloudy and he deduced that uranium
was giving off invisible rays. Radioactivity had been discovered.

Atomic data
Oxidation states and isotopes
 Supply risk