![]() ![]() Immediately, leaders of the Manhattan Project knew they would need to purchase and mine large amounts of uranium in a short amount of time. Radium isolation continued to be uranium’s main purpose until the outbreak of World War II and the discovery that uranium could be converted into plutonium when using a nuclear reactor. Uranium mining began on a large scale in the Czech Republic in the late 19th century as a way to procure ores for use in Marie Curie’s studies to isolate radium. The demand for uranium mining and men to work those mines skyrocketed in the early days of the Manhattan Project, and would become one of its enduring legacies. Uranium could also be transformed into plutonium in a nuclear reactor. ![]() Uranium-235, which is fissile, would need to be separated from the much more common isotope uranium-238. For the fuel for atomic weapons, scientists needed fissile isotopes of uranium and plutonium. Scientists learned that uranium-238 could be converted into a separate element, plutonium-239. The discovery of uranium fission in 1938 led several countries to begin research into the possibility of developing an atomic bomb. It was isolated shortly after, but its radioactive properties were not discovered until 1896 by Henri Becquerel. Uranium was discovered in 1789 by German scientist Martin Heinrich Klaproth in the mineral pitchblende. ![]()
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