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Uranium's radioactivity can present health and environmental issues in the case of nuclear waste produced by nuclear power plants or weapons manufacturing. Uranium is weakly radioactive and remains so because of its long physical half-life (4.468 billion years for uranium-238).
Natural uranium contains about 0.72% 235 U. Depleted uranium has lower mass fractions—up to three times less—of 235 U and 234 U than natural uranium. Since 238 U has a much longer half-life than the lighter isotopes, DU is about 40% less radioactive than natural uranium.
One of the advantages of this method is that any sample provides two clocks, one based on uranium-235's decay to lead-207 with a half-life of about 703 million years, and one based on uranium-238's decay to lead-206 with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years, providing a built-in crosscheck that allows accurate determination of the age of the ...
Uranium mining is the process of extracting uranium ore from the ground. Kazakhstan, Canada, and Australia are the top three producers and together account for 63% of world uranium production. [30] A prominent use of uranium is as fuel for nuclear power plants. The mining and milling of uranium present significant dangers to the environment. [31]
Due to historic activities typically related to the radium industry, uranium mining, and military programs, numerous sites contain or are contaminated with radioactivity. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy (DOE) states there are "millions of gallons of radioactive waste" as well as "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and ...
It's easy to lose track of nuclear news out of Oak Ridge. Here's why the Sept. 4 announcement was so different.
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Dams holding some 700,000 cubic meters (185 million gallons) of uranium mine tailings in Kyrgyzstan have become unreliable following a 2017 landslide. A further landslide or earthquake could send ...