Uranium in Nature

In Periodic Table of element, Uranium is in transition element. This element is considered to be natural occurring. They can be found in nature and do not need to be created in laboratory. Some natural occurring element has very short half-life and very unstable isotope. Because of Uranium in transition element, they exist in hard rock’s form naturally .It exhibit high boiling point and likely to be hard and brittle. Uranium was discovered by Martin Heinrich Klaproth. Uranium has existed since the born of our earth. It is radioactive element. In rock’s form, Uranium can be found naturally in 3 type of isotope which is U-238(99.29%), U-234(0.005%) and U-235(0.711%).The half-life of U-238 and U-235 is about 4.47 x 10⁹ years and 7.04 x 10⁸ years respectively. Uranium 238 is the most stable isotope because it has half-life about 4.5 billion years. This number is equal to the age of the world!! That is why there is plenty of Uranium in our life today which is about 50% still have plenty time to decay. For fissionable type U-235, it has about 700 millions half-life because it is less stable. Although it is gone about 98.8%, but there is enough U-235 left available in our earth nowadays. We should note that, Uranium is more abundant than silver, zinc and tin.

Canada is the world's biggest producer of uranium with mines in Saskatchewan. This mine produces about 1/3 of the world's uranium. The other producing countries are Namibia, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Australia, Niger, and the US. In Malaysia, we do not produce Uranium, hence we need to import from above countries if we plan in future to use it in nuclear power plant.